About 200 students got an inside look at how the Virgin Islands is powered as part of special activities hosted last week by the BVI Electricity Corporation.
Through the BVIEC’s inaugural “Watts Going On!” event — which ran from Nov. 10-14 — students took guided tours of the Henry Wilfred Smith Power Station in Pockwood Pond and the Anegada Power Station.
“It was pretty good to have individuals from the outside coming in and see what we do here,” said Jerry Jones, a senior mechanic at BVIEC. “Most of the time, an individual might feel that we just turn off the power. And as we continue to remind people, our job is to sell electricity — so when we turn off your power, we don’t make any money. But we try our best to provide you with adequate supply, and we make sure that it’s as safe as possible.”
During the tours, he and other BVIEC employees shared examples of why an outage may occur.
“It could be somebody running a pole, could be a tree fall on a wire,” he said. “It could be a earth fault or even generator failure. But most of the time that we have these instances, it’s not as simple as somebody just getting up and take off your power — unless it is for the means of a maintenance to be carried out.”
Throughout the week, two to three tours were held each day, according to Kamal Haynes, the public relations and marketing media manager at the BVIEC.
Mr. Jones said the students stayed very engaged throughout the tours.
“It made me feel like I was a college professor,” he said. “These kids are deep. They are very deep. Some of these kids, you can see that they are very interested in the engines that we have. They are very interested in what we do here. They asked a lot of questions about the components, about the professions, about the different fluids, the different engines that we use.”
Participating schools included Claudia Creque Educational Centre, BVI Seventh-day Adventist School, Bregado Flax Educational Centre, Agape Total Life Academy, Elmore Stoutt High School, Cedar International School, Virgin Islands School of Technical Studies and H. Lavity Stoutt Community College, according to the utility.
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