WAPA's Richmond, Christiansted Power Plant. By. ERNICE GILBERT FOR VI CONSORTIUM
Both the St. Thomas-St. John and St. Croix districts were affected by V.I Water and Power Authority outages on Tuesday, with some customers on St. Croix reporting outages up to five times during the disruption.
The outages started in St. Thomas, when just before 4:00 p.m. WAPA said restoration of electrical service was underway following an interruption that affected portions of the STT-STJ district. WAPA said a power generation-related outage at 3:54 p.m. impacted service to customers on Feeders 6A, 7A, 7B, 7C, 8A, 8B, 9C, and 9E. At least three interruptions occurred in the St. Thomas-St. John District, according to alerts provided on WAPA's Facebook page.
On St. Croix, the interruptions — first reported between the hours of 6-7 p.m. — were so frequent that WAPA itself could not keep up with the updates.
Then, believing the disruption had been fixed and stabilized, WAPA said power on St. Croix was restored to all customers at 7:21 p.m. — only to be on the receiving end of swift backlash from customers. "...And left at 7:29 p.m.," said one customer, as many other reports of outages flooded WAPA's Facebook page.
In its last post of Facebook for Tuesday, WAPA said, "Electric service has been restored to all customers on St. Croix and in the St. Thomas St. John district following generation related outages. Both power plants experienced a loss of generation capacity which resulted in the service interruptions.
Customers on St. Thomas-St. John were fully restored at 7:17 pm and those on St. Croix at 8:42 pm."
