WAPA Still Experiencing Problems — Thankful for Public’s Patience

The Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority experienced a major incident at 7:50 a.m. Tuesday at the Randolph E. Harley Power Plant when a boiler tube blew out and damaged the west wall of Steam Generating Unit 13 Boiler, as well as ignited a small fire in the adjacent switch yard.  

As a result, the entire plant tripped which resulted in island-wide outages on St. Thomas and St. John.  As of 11 p.m. Tuesday, WAPA had restored Units 22 and 12 to service.  

As of 11 a.m. today, all of Feeders 7E, 9A, 9B, 10A, 10B and a Section of Feeder # 6 have been restored to service on St. Thomas and a large section of Feeder #9E has been restored on St. John.   

Plant Personnel are presently working on restoring Units 18, 23, 15 and 11 and will continue to restore service to the remaining feeders as quickly as possible. If necessary, a rotation schedule will be implemented in order to provide service to as many customers as possible as work continues in the Harley Power Plant.          

WAPA’s Executive Director, Hugo Hodge, Jr. said that “absolutely every effort is being made to restore service.”

“We know that this is a particularly trying time for our customers as they are preparing for Thanksgiving,” said Hodge. “We can empathize with the inconvenience that they may be experiencing at this time and we are thankful for their patience.”

WAPA will continue to update its customers as progress is made towards full restoration.