Aerial shot f the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority's Estate Richmond, St. Croix plant. By. ERNICE GILBERT/VI CONSORTIUM
ST. CROIX — The Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority issued a notice this morning stating that an electrical service interruption started affecting St. Croix at 4:50 a.m. Sunday. The island-wide outage — whose cause was because of loss of generation capacity at the Estate Richmond Power Plant — was the second island-wide event in less than 24 hours.
Relative to the latest outage, WAPA said plant personnel were working to restore generators at the power plant which will facilitate service restoration.
On Saturday, an island-wide power outage affected St. Croix at around 2:00 p.m., and WAPA — the territory's sole water and electricity provider — said it would start restoring service at around 6:00 p.m. that evening.
In a notification to its customers, WAPA said preliminary findings indicated that an electric fault in a switchgear at the Estate Richmond Power Plant tripped the power plant and all electrical feeders.
When 6:00 p.m. arrived, power started to return to portions of St. Croix, but many of the feeders lost power again, and again after it had returned a second time, ending with a total of three power outages in some areas before the power was stabilized.
WAPA's alert this morning did not say when it expected power to be restored.
