WAPA off again explain Hodge's Raise

they probably hired a consultant...who likely got paid alot for the bad advice....that is the VI way as well.

We lost power last night at about 8:30. It's still out! Good job WAPA!

Power came back on Beeston Hill at 1:00 pm today after going out last night at 8:30 pm. Out 17 hours. It went out again today at 5:00pm. Maybe if we paid them better we would get better service, ya think?

Vote for another increase in Hodge's pay. Maybe we'll get better service.......

Vote for another increase in Hodge's pay. Maybe we'll get better service.......

Yup, he's busy filling his retirement fund instead o0f the fuel tanks!

Or maybe we'll all get a visit from the Energizer Bunny when the lights go out...

WAPA out again! Four times in four days. A perfectly awful record. What a great job WAPA and Hodge are doing, money well spent.

Lost power today twice :X I guess this is how the summer is gonna be. Innovative lost power at least 4 times. When there is no current, the AC at UVI doesn't work :-X

I heard a rumor that WAPA is bring in a new power source!

Must have lost power half a dozen times or more today. Anybody have Hodges' cell?

Entire island had a WAPA FAIL.
Mr Hodge was on the radio saying it was nothing important, a relay or something.

Why do I not feel consoled?

When it appeared the rest of our area was back online we were not. I called WAPA line department at 4:30 PM and was advised they were aware of a problem in our neighborhood and that she "was working on it".

Two hours alter we hadn't seen nor heard any WAPA trucks in the area so i called back. "The crew is gathering it's equipment".

About two hours later still no crew. My wife calls the line deparment. The young lady confirms a problem in our area and says the crew will be here in about an hour.

Two hours later, after dark, our neighbor pulls down our road with a WAPA truck in tow. Our neighbors had also made several calls to WAPA and they called him at his job to ask him to lead the crew in.

The crew says there had been island wide outages all day. At one point the entire island was out. They told us they were going to change the fuse on our transformer - but they didn't think that would fix it. The new fuse went in and the lights came on. While they were packing up, however, the fuse popped. Dang!

One guy said "I knew that wasn't gonna fix it. You need a new transformer. They'll be out here in about an hour and we won't leave until they get here."

At 9:30 Pm one of the crew yells out they are leaving to go meet the transformer crew to lead them in.

10:15 PM the transformer crew arrives. They go right to work.

11:00 PM - new transformer installed and power restored. The guys were packed up and on their before I even had a chance to go out and offer them a "beverage".

There are only three homes fed from our transformer. Hardly an emergency when it comes to after hours service calls. All things considered i think that was pretty great service.

While management needs much to be desired I've always had positive experiences with WAPA crews.

Here's to the line department! (tu)(tu)

I think the real question here is what is the root cause of the outages? Is it as simple as WAPA not having enough money/acumen to do preventive or dare I say it predictive maintenance? Is it an issue of poor quality power generation which in turn destroys distribution systems? How often is WAPA having trips of their gas turbines and wearing them out prematurely? We need answers to these questions to really determine if Mr. Hodge is earning his paycheck.

I did see him on the news last night in an interesting story talking about a study to tie the grids together (St. Croix, St. Thomas, St. John, and I think they even said Puerto Rico.) I'm sure there's some downside I don't understand but as a layman it sounds like if this could be done in an economically feasible manner that power generation outages might be minimized (but power distribution issues wouldn't be improved per se.)

Similar to specialk's story, we got good service from WAPA in Salt River STX on the afternoon of 6/21/10 for a localized problem. I heard 2 loud pops (tranformer fuses?) then we lost power, then eventually we called WAPA who said they just found out about the outage. Nobody had called WAPA earlier because everybody assumed somebody else would call, since it's usually the entire feeder or the entire island. Anyway, WAPA trucks were here soon after that, and power was restored about 1 hour after that. Total outage was 2 hours and 40 minutes, affecting (I think) about 10 houses + 66 units at Gentle Winds condos.