St. Croix attorney Lee J. Rohn once again headed up her own troupe for the 2002 Crucian Christmas Festival.
Photo by Jamie Bate

A 2002 Crucian Christimas Festival Adult Parade spectator got up close and personal on Saturday in Frederiksted.
Photo by Jamie Bate

Brian and Jen donned their carnival headgear for the 2002 Crucian Christmas Festival Adult Parade on Saturday in Frederiksted.
Photo by Jamie Bate

Jan. 7, 2002 – Although they would like to say the worst is over, Water and Power Authority officials are taking what they say is a realistic and cautious attitude about the prospects of more power outages such as those that struck St. Thomas, St. John and Water Island Sunday and Monday.
At a press conference Monday afternoon, Joseph Thomas, WAPA executive director, and Glenn Rothgeb, assistant executive director, apologized to the public for the inconvenience the outages have caused. But they also said they could not promise an easy fix for the problems behind them.
Thomas said the recent outages have "the same basic root cause as the series of major outages about two months ago." These he described as "an aging 15 KVA circuit and a 34.5 KVA circuit" which should have been overhauled or replaced years ago. "KV" means "kilovolt," or 1,000 volts. Thus, 15 KV would be 15,000 volts of electricity. "A" stands for amperes, a measure of electric current.
Circuits carry power from the generators. The 15 KVA circuit is 30 years old, and the 34.5 KVA circuit is 10 years old, Thomas said.
He said the outages have resulted from the failure of certain insulators, either at the transformer/interconnection point or on the power distribution assembly, or "bus," at the Krum Bay power plant. When an insulator fails, a short-circuit occurs. A dilemma for WAPA, he said, is when to replace the old insulators.
The entire circuit system is scheduled for replacement in July, with plans calling for the undertaking to be funded by a proposed bond issue which has not yet been approved by the WAPA board. Replacing the old insulators before that time would entail taking power down for extended periods, Thomas said. Because there was no way of predicting when the insulators might fail, he said, WAPA decided to hold off on replacing them until July. "We don't know when an insulator might fail — it could be a year from now, or tomorrow," he said.
However, in light of the two major outages in such close succession, Thomas said, "We now plan to begin replacing the oldest of these insulators during planned outages, probably in the early morning hours." He said it could take several weeks before the worst of the insulators are replaced. He stressed that the work will take place at times deemed lease inconvenient to businesses and the public. No work will be undertaken without first informing the public, he said.
Neither WAPA executive would venture to say that that the situation is currently under control. "We are still having burps," Rothgeb said. "The systems aren't entirely stable yet." Thomas said WAPA crews have been working around the clock on the problems.
When the new Unit 22 was brought on line last September, WAPA touted it as being able to meet peak demands, even with two units out of service. On Monday, Thomas said the unit "is running just fine. It is having startup burps."
Rothgeb said that because of Unit 22's "tighter tolerance," the unit tripped off a few dozen times Sunday. The relay systems between Unit 22 and the other units are incompatible, he said, something that was not evident in the testing stage and came to light only when problems arose. "The relay settings and protective devices on Unit 22 will have to be changed to correspond with island reality," he said.
WAPA is contacting Pratt & Whitney, the manufacturer of the unit, about the problems.
Thomas said the utility situation in the territory is markedly different from that on the mainland in that, "We are independent, completely responsible, and alone." On the mainland, most utilities are hooked into a grid network; so, if one unit goes out of service, there is backup and "it is not catastrophic." He said it's possible that several units could fail in a grid network, and the public would never be aware of it.
In contrast, he said, "We are a stand-alone utility." He said he is looking into networking options, one being the possibility of interconnecting with the Hovensa refinery's independent power system.
Rothgeb said the most recent outage problems started about 1 p.m. Sunday, when a fault occurred on Feeder 10A, which serves the St. Thomas waterfront. Although downtown St. Thomas was brought back on line, an insulator failure occurred on the 15 KVA power distribution assembly at the Krum Bay power plant. Units 11, 13 and 15, all operating at the time, were kicked off line when the failure occurred.
Unit 11 was repaired overnight and was back on line Monday, Rothgeb said. Unit 13, after several hours work, also was back on line. Unit 15 was still being worked on Monday afternoon, and Units 14 and 18 were being brought back on line. He said Unit 22 would be brought back on line once the entire system's voltage was stabilized. Meanwhile, Unit 12 is down for scheduled repairs.

Loretta Sophia Edney Henry, age 65, of Estate Grove Place passed away on Jan. 4 in Puerto Rico. Funeral service will take place at 10 a.m. on Thursday,Jan. 10, at the Midland Moravian Church. Viewing will begin at 9 a.m. Interment will follow at the Kingshill Cemetery.
Loretta Henry is survived by her husband Clarence Henry Sr.; daughters Leona Henry-Smith, Olive Henry, Marlene Henry and Beverly Henry; adopted daughters Delores English-Edwards and Carolyn James-Valentine; sons Clarence Henry Jr. and James Henry; 12 grandchildren; sisters Chrystalia Edney-Parris, Magdalene Edney and Leona Edney Macedon; brothers Stanley, George and Arthur Edney; and other relatives and friends too numerous to mention.
Professional service is entrusted to James Memorial Funeral Home Inc.

Dear Source,
Congratulations to Vera Falu, Lawrence Bastian and the rest of the Festival Committee for an outstanding job. This was clearly one of the best-organized and most enjoyable festivals in many years. Everything seemed to fall into place and it was truly a community event.
The business sector responded with financial support. Civic groups, especially the Rotarians and Gentlemen of Jones, did their part in decorating the streets and parks. Government agencies, especially Public Works and the Police, did their jobs superbly well. The parades were just outstanding with the participation of all sectors of our community.
Indeed, we all needed a good festival to forget the pain and troubles of this past year.
Now, as we savor the sweet success of this event and start planning for the 50th anniversary of the Crucian Festival, I will take this opportunity to make a strong pitch for a permanent, well-constructed festival village in Frederiksted. It is time for us Crucians to build a world-class festival village that truly reflects the beautiful and diverse culture of our people.
This world-class festival village must be properly designed by well-chosen architects, engineers and culturally savvy icons of our community — such as Wayne James, John Abramson and others.
In my vision, this new village will have a majestic entrance, and its grounds will be covered with decorative stones, outdoor tiles and strategically placed palm trees and plants.
It will have ample, clean and well-lighted bathrooms just like at a modern airport. There will be clusters of beautiful well-constructed booths dedicated to each of our ancestral and cultural groups.
There will be sections of this village with overhead covering and comfortable seating for the weary and especially for our seniors. The children's sections will be located at the Midre Cummings Youth Park. There will be a magnificent stage with a state of the art sound system.
The fort, beach, and other amenities in the area will become natural extensions of the new festival village.
The time is right to elevate this traditional cultural event — the Crucian Festival — to a new level of excellence and pride. As I have said on many occasions, the St. Croix Christmas Festival can become the most attractive and fun-filled winter event in the entire Caribbean and southeastern USA.
Let’s do it.
Please note, these are my personal views, not necessarily those of the St. Croix Chamber of Commerce or of any other institution or employers that I may be affiliated with.
Carmelo Rivera
St. Croix

Editor's note:We welcome and encourage readers to keep the dialogue going by responding to Source commentary. Letters should be e-mailed with name and place of residence to source@viaccess.net.

Jan. 7, 2001 – If a mind is a terrible thing to waste, "A Beautiful Mind" must be just that much more terrible a thing to lose.
That is what happened to real-life mathematical genius John Forbes Nash Jr. (Russell Crowe), who made an astonishing discovery early on in his career, earning him international acclaim, only subsequently to fall heir to schizophrenia.
Under what one critic calls the "clean, forceful" direction of Ron Howard, the movie traces a 50-year span of Nash's life, from his days as an arrogant Princeton student in 1947 through his decent into a horrific madness — and then back up again to claim the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economic Science.
Russell Crowe comes into his own, making a seamless change from his Charleton Heston-esque "Gladiator" to the troubled Nash, in what Metromix.com reviewer Michael Wilmington calls an "amazingly complete performance from an arrogant young genius to a melancholy, vulnerable old man, shambling across the campus trying to keep his demons at bay."
Nash marries Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), a brilliant physics student he meets at MIT, where he is teaching — and where he also meets a shadowy government agent (Ed Harris), who recruits him for a top-secret government job. Alicia, who loves Nash's mind, sticks by him through his disintegration.
Wilmington found the movie "surprisingly scary in its evocation of Nash's private terrors … and moving when it shows us his bonds with Alicia … but it's not especially accurate in its rendering of his life, even though Sylvia Nasar's book, 'A Beautiful Mind,' is its ostensible source."
The final consensus from the reviewing stand is that it's a worthwhile way to spend two and a half hours. The picture "has both edge and human feeling, tension and warm veins of sympathy," Wilmington writes. "It's an ideal subject for Howard's major virtues: rigorous organization, compassion and an ability to draw believable communities."
The film is rated PG for intense thematic material, sexual content and a scene of violence. It is playing at Sunny Isle Theaters.

Pat Love will speak on Relationship Awareness at the Omega seminar at the Marketplace community meeting area on the third floor. The free seminar is for residents and visitors.
A shuttle will meet the 7 p.m. ferry from Red Hook, which arrives around 7:20 p.m. The shuttle will return to the ferry dock in time to make the 9 p.m. ferry to Red Hook. Shuttles run $2 per person.

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Jan. 7, 2002 – A blown insulator at the Water and Power Authority plant in Krum Bay began the power outages that plagued St. Thomas, St. John and Water Island beginning Sunday afternoon and continuing through the night and into Monday morning.
As a result of damage, power-generating units 22 and 18 went down, causing ongoing outages across the islands.
Glenn Rothgeb, WAPA assistant executive director, said Monday morning that units 11, 14 and 18 were back on line and that he expected unit 13 would be back up shortly and "this will all be over."
Rothgeb said the problems are the same as those that caused outages a few months ago.
Basically two issues face the power authority, he said: The insulators need to be replaced, and the new unit 22 isn't perfectly compatible with WAPA's system and has therefore been less than reliable.
Rothgeb said replacing the insulators has been high on the list of WAPA priorities for 10 years, but lack of money has kept it from happening. Now, he said, replacing the insulators has now moved way up on the list.
He also said that because of unit 22's "tighter tolerance," the unit tripped off a few dozen times Sunday. The relay systems between unit 22 and the other units are incompatible, something that was not evident in the testing stage and came to light only when problems arose.
"The relay settings and protective devices on unit 22 will have to be changed to correspond with island reality," he said.
Rothgeb explained that units 11 and 13 are steam units and take four hours to come back on line after going down.
He couldn't say when power would be fully restored. "As soon as any other units" come back up, "this should be ending," he said.
At least two school closings have been announced as a result of the outages. New Testament School in Anna's Retreat and Sts. Peter and Paul School will not hold classes Monday. All Saints Cathedral School will hold classes.
Public schools are closed for the Three Kings Day holiday.
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