After two weeks of holidays, schoolchildren and many government employees got an extra day off as an islandwide Monday blackout closed many public buildings in St. Croix. Power had been pumping for the high-decibel Crucian Christmas Festival events but the only amplified sounds at the start of the workweek were via generator.
At around 5 a.m., a problem with a Water and Power Authority propane pump knocked electricity production offline. A short time later, another generator picked up the slack, said Shanell Petersen, the authority’s director of communications.
Around 8 a.m., the failing generators were coming online, but like an orchestra tuning up, all the power generators needed to find the same pitch. They failed to find this frequency and power was out again, Petersen said.
“That actually damaged one of the transformers. From that, we were able to isolate the issue,” she said. “At about 3:30 we had just about all the feeders restored except for 9B, 6B, and 3A.”
All public schools on the island were closed after the outage — perhaps cause for celebration among students but not for parents who were urged to pick up their children. Buses would be staggered because of the unexpected need.
The Division of Personnel called off the day as well, and Government House postponed its regular Monday press briefing until Tuesday.
WAPA’s crews helped the generators find the frequency and restored power islandwide at around 4:30 p.m., Petersen said.
At the height of St. Croix’s tourism season, on the heels of a visit from President Joe Biden and family, the electrical outage was less than ideal for hospitality providers. While most hotels and restaurants contacted Monday said they hardly noticed the blackout because their generators kicked on immediately, those without the luxury were left explaining the situation to holidaymakers.
A longtime hotel employee who asked not to be identified by name saw the bright side, however, saying the problem was much worse 30 years ago.
Petersen said new generators, like St. Croix’s Aggreko units and St. Thomas’ Wärtsila units, help minimize downtimes.
“Once we brought on the Aggrekos a few years ago, we see much shorter outages and we also see less islandwide outages. And that’s because the smaller generation units, one, are more efficient, and also they come on a lot quicker. And then they can essentially make up for when some of the other units are being used for backup,” she said. “Usually, when we have islandwide outages we have faster restoration but as you can see in this particular instance there are a lot more variables that took place that delayed restoration for the island.”
