Electrical service was restored to customers in the St. Thomas – St. John district at 8:30 p.m. Sunday night, hours after three generating units tripped at the Randolph Harley power plant. The first of the units fell off-line at 2:20 p.m. Sunday after a fault was detected in an underground transmission line. The location of the fault was identified and isolated to facilitate the service restoration process.
Interim Chief Executive Officer Clinton Hedrington, Jr. apologized to the public for the inconvenience caused by the Sunday afternoon service interruption. He also expressed his gratitude to the WAPA employees who worked tirelessly for hours to troubleshoot and isolate the fault. The fault resulted in the units tripping followed by the feeders falling off-line. Feeders provide electrical service to residential and commercial customers.
Plant personnel worked to restore generation capacity prior to re-energizing the electrical grid. “With one unit restored, we immediately began to restore customers on Feeders 5A and 8A and continued the effort until full service to our residential customers had been achieved,” he said.
In once again apologizing to WAPA’s customers for the inconvenience of the Sunday service interruption, and in thanking the Authority’s employees for their dedicated efforts, Hedrington assured the public that all steps will be taken to ensure that this type of service interruption will not be repeated in the future.