Electrical service was restored in the St. Thomas - St. John district on Monday morning, hours after the Randolph Harley Power Plant earlier lost all generation capacity resulting in a district-wide service interruption.

“With all customers restored, our focus now on determining what caused the outage, whether an unusual occurrence on the electric grid, or tripped equipment at the power plant,” said Interim Executive Director / CEO Noel Hodge. “As in the case in all major service interruptions, we want to fully understand what the contributing factors were and how similar occurrences can be avoided in the future.” At this point, he said, it is not clear what circumstances or events tripped the entire power plant at approximately 4 a.m. today.

Hodge said that for several hours after the outage occurred, plant personnel were challenged by operational issues with most of WAPA’s generation fleet. We encountered a wide array of electric, fuel delivery, logic and other system issues with many of the generators.” He said after a while two gas turbines were brought online which restored electrical service to the plant and allowed for a commencement of service restoration to our customers. The LPG-fired Wartsila generators were later dispatched to complete the service restoration effort. “The combination of these units afforded us the production capacity needed to restore all of our customers. Restoration began at approximately 9 a.m. Monday and was completed two hours later,” Hodge said.

He apologized for the inconvenience caused by the outage and thanked the men and women of WAPA who responded to the outage situation to provide their expertise and assistance in facilitating service restoration to all customers.

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