June 16, 2008 — Power was out in large areas of St. Thomas for much of Monday because of problems with switching equipment, with the first fault found about 9:30 a.m. and power fully restored island wide by 5 p.m.
WAPA Executive Director Hugo Hodge Jr. apologized for the outage, attributing it to obsolete equipment in the Randolph E. Harley Power Plant, according to a statement issued by WAPA shortly after power was restored.
"However, we will be able to virtually eliminate problems such as this in the very near future," Hodge said. "Because we have done an excellent job of upgrading our relay coordination in the Harley Power Plant, we were able to avoid an island-wide outage. That would have been the scenario just a few months ago had this same malfunction occurred with the existing switching equipment in the old substation."
Plant personnel discovered a fault in a feeder circuit at about 9:30 a.m. that caused a malfunction on switches for that feeder, according to WAPA spokesperson Cassandra Dunn. Subsequently, power was lost to the 15kV substation, which serves six other feeder circuits. While power was restored to three feeders, service to sections of the other three feeders was interrupted intermittently throughout the morning while linemen worked several hours to tie feeders together and restore power to as many areas as possible.
Shortly after noon, technicians interrupted service to sections of feeders serving the west end and north side areas of St. Thomas and part of the Hospital Ground area to complete the repairs. Power to all but small sections of two feeders was restored by 4 p.m. The rest were restored by 5 p.m.
In the future, this particular source of trouble will be less likely, according to Hodge.
"We are presently completing the installation of a state-of-the-art 34kV/15kV double breaker, double bus substation in the Harley Plant, which we expect to put into operation by the end of the year," he said. "The new substation will improve reliability through the availability of redundant switchgear, and we will then be able to fully retire the old substation with its antiquated equipment."
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