Aug. 14, 2005 — A power outage on St. Thomas and St. John around 9 p.m. Saturday was caused by the failure of several insulator units at the V.I. Water and Power Authority's Crown Bay plant on St. Thomas, according to a WAPA official.
"Two of the insulator units failed initially, and because of that, several others began to experience problems as well," Glenn Rothgeb, WAPA’s chief operations officer said. "When we went to fix them, we found out that we had about seven insulators that were malfunctioning in a substation of the plant … and these controlled the power for the central, north, and west areas of the island."
Rothgeb added that difficulties experienced by WAPA teams trying to fix the substation subsequently caused a delay in the restoration of power for the district. "To get everything back up, we had to find an alternative power source to feed the units that were down, so we had to operate from our East End plant."
Because of this, electricity was not fully restored to all parts of St. Thomas and St. John until about 10 a.m. Sunday.
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