At roughly 2:30 Thursday morning, a fuel coupling in one of the Water and Power Authority’s 20-year-old units broke, triggering an emergency shutdown that knocked out electrical currents across St. Thomas and St. John. It took power plant personnel about three hours to track down the broken part, WAPA officials said, but much longer to get electricity flowing steadily again.
As disruptive as the power outage was, erroneous reports of an explosion at the Randolph Harley plant and video purporting to show a new fuel spill added fake fuel to the fire.
At around 11:30 a.m., as WAPA engineers were firing up the 12-year-old Unit 27 and the 43-year-old Unit 15 generators, a safety shutoff system snapped into action, causing a thunderous bang. The device, called a rupture disc, is designed to break and save equipment from damage when something’s gone wrong, said Shanell Petersen, WAPA’s communications director.
“This is just one of the safety mechanisms that exist across the plant,” Petersen said. “It just so happens that this particular one was a very loud feature.”
There was no explosion, no fire, and no injuries, Petersen said, just an extraordinarily loud noise that sent social media and some mainstream media outlets into a frenzy.
Petersen said the power plant was evacuated out of an abundance of caution, following frequently practiced protocols. Emergency fire personnel were also on the scene midday.
“The plant is huge,” Petersen said. “It’s important that the evacuation protocol is still followed so that they can assess what the loud noise was.”
At the same time, a video of fuel spilling over the top of a WAPA storage tank began circulating, causing further alarm. While some speculated the video was fake — perhaps generated by artificial intelligence — others feared the territory’s waters may be in danger again.
It would not have been the first explosion at the plant, nor the first fuel spill.
The video circulated Thursday was not new, Petersen said, but from an October 2023 fuel spill. The liquid cascading over the side of a tank in the video was largely captured in a catchment, but some 50,000 gallons of No. 2 diesel did escape, according to an update from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Monday. Local and federal environmental cleanup crews were still working to restore hillsides in Lindbergh Bay and Krum Bay Thursday.
By 2:30 p.m. almost all power was restored, Petersen said, and as of 4 p.m. less than 100 customers were without electricity.
Still, the outage wrought a vast swath of lost productivity.
Electrical fluctuations caused by the power outage knocked Cyril E. King’s generator offline at 7:30 a.m. It came back online at 2:30 p.m., but in the interim, befuddled passengers stood in long lines at the screening areas. The airport terminal remained open, however, and passengers were processed by Customs and Transportation Security Administration for their flights, said Monifa Brathwaite, the Port Authority’s public information officer.
All public schooling was cancelled in the St. Thomas-St. John District, after an earlier attempt to open at 10 a.m., the Virgin Islands Education Department said. The power outage also forced Lockhart K-8’s music department to postpone its spring concert. The school concert was rescheduled for May 14 at 7 p.m.
Fans of irony may take delight in a notice from the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority that its St. Thomas Port of Sale and St. John Marketplace customer service and business offices opened late, at 10:00 a.m. due to the district-wide outage.
“The Authority thanks the community for understanding and apologizes for the inconvenience,” according to a press release.
