The V.I. Water and Power Authority governing board convened Friday to approve a seven-thousand-barrel diesel purchase after its regular Puerto Rico-based supplier had issues securing a vessel to service the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The ultra-low-sulfur diesel was purchased from Borinken Towing and Salvage at 40 cents per gallon. WAPA Chief Executive Officer Karl Knight said the utility typically burns around 1,300 barrels of diesel every day, and the regular diesel shipment — which was expected earlier this week — is slated to arrive Monday.
“We believe that we have sufficient fuel to bridge us to the window for that shipment … between Sunday and Tuesday,” Knight told board members, “and we believe we have enough fuel with this interim arrangement we’re asking you to ratify to take us to Tuesday — considering the existing fuel in the tank as well.”
Knight told board members that the delivery disruption was caused because the barge used by its supplier, Puerto Rico-based Peerless Oil and Chemicals, ran aground near San Juan months ago. That vessel, a barge called the Defiant, serviced both St. Croix and St. Thomas.
“It was damaged beyond repair, and that has sent them into a scramble of trying to source other vessels that can supply the route,” he said. “So that reliability that we had — that barge that really was going between Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands — that has kind of gone out the window now.”
Knight said the authority has been working with them to “see if there’s some resolution on the near horizon for those challenges.”
“And I suspect that’s what was at play this time around — getting a barge that could respond as quickly as we needed it to respond,” he said.
In approving the diesel purchase, the governing board also passed a measure requiring that WAPA leadership provide board members with weekly updates regarding the utility’s cash-on-hand for diesel and liquefied petroleum gas procurements for both St. Thomas’s Randolph Harley Power Plant and the Richmond power plant on St. Croix.
During the special governing board meeting and in a statement issued Friday morning, the utility continued to stress that outages earlier in the week were caused first by planned work on the utility’s Feeder 13 bypass project and later by the unexpected shutdown of two generators at the St. Thomas power plant. The outages were not caused by a lack of fuel or failure to pay for it, officials repeatedly said. That misapprehension may have been caused in part by a statement the utility issued in error Tuesday morning outlining a precautionary rotation schedule meant to conserve fuel. Knight attributed the erroneous statement to an internal miscommunication.
“Some folks thought maybe we hadn’t finished the work we were doing on Feeder 13. Some folks thought maybe this scenario that we had been planning for a fuel shortage was playing out, and there was a few folks in the control room that knew what was actually happening — which is, we had lost some generation once we tried to close back in St. John,” he said. “And that actually was the reason for the outage on Tuesday morning.”
