Flying objects can be blamed for at least a couple of recent power outages on St. Croix, according to Water and Power Authority officials.
A spate of early-morning outages over the last several weeks have shut down power to sections of the island. The latest outage occurred Wednesday, knocking out power to areas of Feeder 6, according to WAPA information officer Patricia Blake-Simmonds. She didn’t say how long the outage lasted.
On April 21, power was out from 6:51 to 7:41 a.m. after a kite became entangled in distribution lines in La Grande Princesse.
The day before that, power was out all over the island between 8:43 and 9:26 a.m. after "a heavy electrical short fed back into the Richmond plant from a flashover on a transformer bank on Feeder 1," a WAPA release stated. What happened, it said, was that a bird come in contact with and bridged the gap on a lightning arrester near the Richmond Fire Station.
And on the morning of April 19, a "neutral in close proximity to a phase on a pole on Feeder 1" caused power to go out between 7:10 and 7:30. WAPA translated that to mean that at the outage location a pole was pulled by Vitelco to support one of the telephone company’s large cables.