The St. Croix Coastal Zone Management Committee tabled decisions on two of the V.I. Water and Power Authority’s federally funded underground electrical projects Tuesday, citing flooding and reliability concerns.
Committee Chair Massarae Webster said commissioners will schedule a meeting with WAPA representatives — “hopefully within the week.”
“Once we’ve had that meeting and we are able to resolve the concerns, then we will schedule a follow-up meeting to vote on agenda items one and two,” she said. Those items relate to underground projects in parts of Christiansted and Frederiksted.
WAPA representatives and Pete Bonnes, president of FXB Engineering, presented the projects to the CZM Committee in October. On Tuesday, they reviewed the plans to install underground ducts, pad-mounted transformers and other devices in the two downtown areas. In between, heavy rainfall knocked out power in Christiansted — flooding manholes and submerging power lines — requiring days of repairs by WAPA personnel and a contractor.
During a November board meeting, WAPA Executive Director and CEO Karl Knight acknowledged some of the problems with placing the power infrastructure underground.
“We are investing a lot in undergrounding because we’re trying to mitigate against one risk, which is the high winds and wind-related damage that comes from tropical storms and events,” he said at the time. “In trying to mitigate that risk, we exposed ourselves to other points of failure — in this case, heavy rains and the flooding have been a challenge.”
Commissioner Kai Nielsen sought information about undergrounding’s reliability during Tuesday’s meeting.
“My concern is that we’re having feedback from the primary clients — which are the commercial clients in Christiansted — that power isn’t reliable even with this underground unit,” he said. “I’m hearing something around aesthetics being the trump card, aesthetics being more important than our customers and our commercial centers having reliable power.”
Nielsen said the government relies on money from gross receipts, which requires that commercial properties generate income.
“If we’re constantly seeing that these clients don’t have power,” he asked, “how are we generating money? If I’m hearing from an expert that undergrounding is super reliable, but you’re underground right now and you’re losing power, what am I supposed to believe?”
Cordell Jacobs Jr., WAPA’s interim transmission and distribution director, said the authority experiences more outages with overhead systems because of vegetation and weather events, but Nielsen remained frustrated by the lack of concrete data available during Tuesday’s meeting.
Odari Thomas, associate project management director for the territory’s Super Project Management Office, later called Nielsen’s concern valid and noted that the projects fall within a procurement bundle that was structured to allow for flexibility in the projects’ design “in order to install reliable and resilient infrastructure in the Christiansted Town area that will be highly resilient against water infiltration since we do know that it is a great concern in that area.”
The committee had few qualms about a third underground project that would see utility lines buried from Queen Mary Highway along Estate Herman Hill Road to the renovated V.I. Territorial Emergency Management Agency headquarters. Commissioners noted that the area was less prone to flooding and unanimously approved the item.
Three Convenience Centers Approved
Commissioners unanimously approved a federal consistency determination sought by the V.I. Waste Management Authority to construct three convenience centers in estates Concordia, Cotton Valley and the Colquhoun and Mon Bijou area.
Trash collection services on St. Croix were upended last month when Waste Management’s contractor, Bates Trucking, announced that it would discontinue services because of millions of dollars in unpaid invoices. The authority awarded a new collection contract to Just Right Trucking.
Days later, the company lost seven heavy vehicles — three garbage trucks, two dump trucks, a backhoe and an excavator — to arson.
