Thousands of residents and businesses across St. Thomas were left without power Monday after V.I. Water and Power Authority personnel found a leak from a liquid petroleum gas line at the Randolph Harley Power Plant.
Restoration efforts were delayed after a second leak was found hours later, and WAPA Chief Executive Karl Knight said a “minor rotation schedule” will be implemented.
This story will be updated when that schedule is announced.
WAPA spokesperson Shanell Petersen said the first leak — found at approximately 9 a.m. — was contained quickly. Personnel found the second leak hours later, and the plant was evacuated a second time according to the utility’s safety protocols.
“I think it’s important to note that the emergency shutdown system activated as it’s intended to so that the equipment is safe, the plant is safe and the people are safe,” she added.
Separately, more than a thousand WAPA customers on Feeder 7A lost power Monday after a utility pole caught fire. Petersen said Monday’s incidents were unrelated to a failure at the plant’s LPG terminal last week.
“Last week was probably a more troubling event, but this is more of a freak incident. It’s a gas leak — we just had to do things out of an abundance of caution,” Knight told the Source, adding that plant personnel had to wait for fuel lines to thaw in order to energize generator units.
The repeated outages come as the utility works to make four Wartsila generators commissioned in January able to run on propane. Those units experienced problems almost immediately, but the utility has been able to operate them with diesel fuel. Knight told the Source that personnel were working on switching a unit to propane operation before Monday’s interference.
“So far so good, but the disruption today kind of set us back,” he said.