ST. THOMAS – Close to 40 people marched from Emancipation Garden to Government House and the Legislature this afternoon to protest the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority and its management of the power crisis in the territory.
Clarence Payne, one of the protest organizers, said they had come out today because “enough is enough.” Payne is a former senator who was born and raised on St. Thomas, and while he is accustomed to the power outages, he said the current situation was unprecedented.
“There has never been anything as similar to this,” Payne said. “In my lifetime, not even close.”
In the past week thousands of residents on the islands of St. Thomas and St. John were subjected to rolling power outages, due in part to a fault in the underground section of Feeder 13. This month has also seen the resignation of Andrew Smith, the Authority’s chief executive officer, as well as an ongoing saga of financial difficulty for the Authority. All the while the territory remains in a local energy state of emergency, which Governor Albert Bryan Jr. declared in April of this year.
“This is going on two generations now of the same nonsense, the same excuses,” said Andre Malone, who joined in today’s protest march. “Since 1970, when I was in kindergarten right here, we've been having power outages. And it's been one excuse after the next, one governor after the next, one board after the next, one spokesperson after the next and it's the same nonsense, year after year, decade after decade.”
As the protesters stood outside Government House on St. Thomas chanting “send someone out,” the governor spoke at a press briefing at St. Croix’s Government House where he briefly discussed the need to bring energy security to the Virgin Islands.
“In a way I really appreciate the organizations that are coming out to protest WAPA,” Bryan said. “It just puts an exclamation mark on why we need to have a state of emergency.”
Back on St. Thomas, the protesters marched to the Legislature where they attracted the attention of Senator Milton Potter, chair of the Committee on Disaster Recovery, Infrastructure and Planning, who came outside the gates of the Legislature to address the protesters directly, saying that their concern was a legitimate one.
“It's not something that just popped up,” Potter said. “We've had challenges with WAPA for over five decades or more. The solution is definitely complex. But I think we need to be careful not to look at WAPA as some foreign entity that's doing something to us. WAPA is a Virgin Islands entity. So, we need to work collaboratively to fix WAPA."
The continuous nature of the issues plaguing the Authority were apparent in a press release that WAPA issued shortly after the protest this afternoon. WAPA stated that although Feeder 13 had been repaired on Friday, the rolling outages would continue in the St. Thomas/St. John District due to a new problem with Unit 23, causing reduced generation capacity at the Randolph Harley Power Plant.
