St. Croix residents spent Veterans Day without electricity after the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority's generation system failed completely on Wednesday morning.
The blackout began just after 8:00 a.m. when generation collapsed at the Richmond Power Plant. Feeder 8B, serving Frederiksted and the West End, cut out at 8:11 a.m. and remained offline until 1:35 p.m., a total of five hours and 24 minutes. WAPA confirmed the island-wide outage at 8:31 a.m., citing loss of generation at Richmond.
Partial power returned to some feeders by mid-morning, but the utility reported secondary outages as crews worked on mechanical repairs. By midday, WAPA imposed rotating emergency load shedding across the island, citing grid instability. Some feeders remained offline under mandatory rotation even after the main restoration effort.
The outage came one day after a similar failure on Tuesday morning, when Feeder 8B went offline for one hour and 45 minutes starting at 8:21 a.m.
Wednesday's collapse highlighted the strain on WAPA's aging infrastructure during peak demand periods. Holidays shift electrical load from commercial areas into residential neighborhoods, where thousands of families simultaneously run air conditioners, appliances, and water pumps. When the Richmond generator failed during this surge, the remaining units could not absorb the load, triggering automatic safety cutoffs that cascaded into a total shutdown.
Residents expressed frustration on social media over the recurring failures. One person posted: "No storm, no hurricane.. just sunny skies and WAPA gone again." Another resident, Yasmin Alfred, described the outages as inhumane, noting the pattern of disruptions at the same time each day.
The blackout also affected St. Thomas and St. John, where WAPA enforced two-hour rotating outages across major feeders from Cruz Bay to Crown Bay on the same day.
The timing drew attention to Governor Albert Bryan Jr.'s September 2024 statement that WAPA would be fixed by the end of his term. Residents contrasted that pledge with the reality of spoiled groceries, damaged appliances, and darkened homes under clear skies.
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