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WAPA Repairs End Rotating Power Outages

July 22, 2008 — After five days of rotating power outages, residents of St. Thomas and St. John could breathe a sigh of relief Tuesday as V.I. Water and Power Authority plant technicians restored the faulty gas turbine that limited generating capacity in the Randolph E. Harley Power Plant.
Upon completion of repairs just before noon, WAPA immediately suspended the rotation schedule, which was in effect Friday and again Monday, and restored service to all St. Thomas and St. John feeders.
Unit 23, a 42-megawatt generator, supplies a major portion of the capacity needed to meet the daily peak demand of 88 megawatts for both islands.
WAPA projected finishing the repairs by Wednesday, according to a statement on the outages, but the part ordered for the unit's ratchet system arrived from Germany on Monday, a day earlier than expected. Plant engineers and technicians worked through the night to complete the work. Unit 23 refused to restart last Thursday after a transformer problem on gas turbine Unit 18 caused a shut down at the power plant.
The unit needs a major overhaul and becomes increasingly difficult to start each time it goes down, said Hugo Hodge Jr., WAPA's executive director. Deferred maintenance is a consequence of WAPA's continuing inability to properly maintain its equipment and meet its continually rising fuel costs, he said.
"You cannot imagine how great we feel right now," Hodge said. "It has been truly a frustrating week for us as we worked to stabilize Harley Power Plant. We know that our customers deserve reliable service and we want them to have it. I want to congratulate plant maintenance and operations personnel and the line crews for their magnificent efforts during this crisis. During the past week, I had an opportunity to witness, firsthand, employees working all day into the very early hours of every morning, refusing to leave until problem after problem was resolved. These are the same employees who work around the clock to maintain power to customers while we sleep."
Hodge went on to thank the rest of WAPA's employees for their efforts and thanked the public for its patience. In coming months, WAPA will return several to service other units now off line for major maintenance. At that time, Unit 23 will get a much-needed overhaul, according to the WAPA statement.
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