When the lights went out during Tropical Storm Ernesto, the rumor mill picked up. As new Water and Power Authority CEO Karl Knight and team worked to assess what knocked much of the territory offline, the coconut telegraph had already diagnosed a critical lack of power transformers. Of all the myriad storm-specific issues and broadening systemic challenges at the long-troubled utility, an immediate shortage of transformers was not on the list, officials told the WAPA Governing Board Thursday.
There were plenty of other things to worry about.
Problems presented at the marathon meeting included WAPA’s monthly deficit of between $5 million and $8 million, cost and timeline overruns for various projects, equipment failures that botched automated meter readings, and mistakenly turning an elderly person’s service off.
WAPA officials said they’d apologized for squelching the aged person’s utilities and urged other elderly people or those in poor health to sign up for a program meant to avoid the issue.
“There is a, for lack of a better term, do-not-disconnect listing that those individuals can opt into that’s managed by the Department of Human Services. We do have protocols in place to prevent people who are medically critical from being disconnected. In this case, I think because of the challenges we have with our existing customer-interface system, somehow that disconnection was processed,” Knight said. “Human error does occur but I don’t see it being systemic or a problem going forward.”
WAPA has since audited its records and is proceeding with greater care, he said.
Determining how much money customers owe has also been a problem due to “issues with the AMI,” or the Advanced Metering Infrastructure system, said WAPA Governing Board Chair Hubert Turnbull.
Virgin Islanders had been complaining on social media platforms about bills suddenly skyrocketing from less than $200 a month to more than $700. A St. John customer said in July their WAPA bill went from an average of between $175 to $300 to more than $3,000.
A third-party contractor studied WAPA’s AMI system and confirmed the problem, said Interim Chief Operations Officer Ashley Bryan.
WAPA was collaborating with the Federal Emergency Management Agency on swapping out the entire AMI system. FEMA provisionally approved a $138 million grant to replace the AMI system, Bryan said, and WAPA was working on drafting a request for proposal outlining the scope of work for potential contractors to bid on.
“We’ll be working with FEMA to finalize that so we can begin that project,” she said. “The project is going to be a long-term project. I would envision replacing the entire system is going to be about a three-year project but it will be done in phases.”
WAPA plans to hire a third-party contractor to replace and reprogram meters and other areas of the system.
“Our staff is completely inundated with the manual processes that we now have to bear with the failing AMI system. That includes disconnects, reconnects, going out to the field to do troubleshooting, getting data when it’s available, and continuously changing out meters that are failing on the system. Our internal capacity is not there,” Bryan said. “It is not going to be a quick turnaround for the magnitude of meters that we have to change.”
The board also approved measures to expand a yearlong, $11 million wire undergrounding project along the Queen Mary Highway. Also on St. Croix, the board approved an additional $47,990 for a sprawling undergrounding project in manholes around feeder 8B — along Emancipation Drive and Hannah’s Rest Road from the Melvin Evans Highway to Fisher Street in Frederiksted.
The board also approved a $464,400 cost increase and end-of-February time extension for management and installation for Phase 2 of St. Thomas’ Wartsila generator project. Battery storage systems at the Randolph Harley Power Plant were up and running this week, WAPA officials said, and could soon be in full service.
While the Richmond Power Plant on St. Croix went dark late Aug. 13 when the storm knocked out power generating equipment, the Randolph Harley Power Plant on St. Thomas remained operational — due in no small part to a dedicated team of WAPA employees applying ingenuity and persistence throughout the storm, officials said. The dominos of individual power feeders across St. Thomas and St. John that went down were largely due to overgrown vegetation and older wooden power poles falling over, Knight said, leaving some customers without power for six days.
The board actually voted to rescind a plan to acquire 119 pad-mounted transformers for undergrounding projects because of timing issues. By the time the transformers would be needed, their warranties would be nearly expired. Plus, WAPA officials said, storing such equipment was hazardous.
Knight pledged renewed efforts toward keeping the bush back, including hiring outside help to clear the areas.
“We certainly need to find our way back to having dedicated tree trimming,” Knight said. “We have the equipment but what remains to be seen is can we get the bodies and can we get the training.”
An in-depth assessment of those power poles and other water and power equipment using digital geographic information systems — commonly called GIS — would improve accuracy in reporting and assessing damage, reducing processing and planning time, and help quickly manage outages, WAPA officials said. It’s a nearly $13 million investment, adding every power pole, transformer, and WAPA customer into an interactive database.
