WAPA Receives Near Universal Praise For Performance During Tropical Storm Fiona; New CEO Explains Success

With strong winds and rain during what was then Tropical Storm Fiona pounding St. Croix Saturday night into Sunday, many residents were caught off guard not by the storm, but by the V.I. Water and Power Authority's performance during the weather system.

A majority of residents, including this reporter, were quite astonished that WAPA managed to keep the power on as the rain continued nonstop accompanied by sometimes winds as strong as 45 mph, and even higher gusts.

The performance wasn't perfect as several feeders lost power during the storm, and some residents reported hourslong outages. But it was notable nonetheless compared to past executions, and the authority's CEO, Andrew Smith responded to the Consortium about the strategy that led to the laudable effort.

WAPA has been receiving almost universal praise for its performance during TS Fiona particularly with keeping the power on. What strategies led to this success?

Smith: Several factors led to the improved system performance:

a) The Authority has been proactively installing switches and other related equipment that isolates outages to smaller and smaller numbers of customers.

b) We have also been focusing on proactively maintaining our system and replacing equipment that needs to be replaced such that the system is better prepared when weather strikes.

c) We also continue to install composite poles that can withstand 200 MPH winds as well as moving portions of the transmission system underground. Both initiatives make the system more reliable, and both initiatives are also funded with grants from our federal partners.

Was the success in part due to the storm’s impact being minimal in terms of damage?

Smith: It would be disingenuous to say that the strength of the storm didn’t help limit the damage, despite the efforts I outlined above. If the storm had been more severe, we likely would have suffered additional outages; however, the proactive steps we have been taking that were outlined above would still help the system perform better, keep the current on, and speed restoration times. One other factor that helped us in the storm is that we had high winds on Saturday morning that resulted in some outages as trees came down and the system suffered other weather-related damage. We were able to undertake significant restoration efforts on Saturday and went into Saturday night with only 697 customers out on STX and zero known outages on STT/STJ. For context we have almost 55,000 electric customers.