Island-wide outage caused by emergency engine shut down

The Commonwealth Utilities Corp. had to initiate an emergency shut down of Power Plant 1’s Engine 7 due to unidentified issues causing the island-wide power outage last Sunday evening.

In a brief interview with CUC executive director Kevin Watson, he shared that late last Monday evening, an island-wide power outage occurred when operators of Power Plant 1 initiated an emergency stop on Engine 7 after hearing a loud noise coming from it. The emergency stop resulted in a cascading effect on all other Power Plants and feeders to protect the Power Plants’ current system.

“The problem wasn’t with the feeder. It was with the engine. Last night, at Power Plant 1, the operators on duty heard a loud noise coming from diesel Engine 7. Upon hearing that, to keep catastrophic damage from occurring, operators hit the emergency stop button. When they did that, it caused a chain reaction of the system shutting down island wide. Immediately after that, they brought another engine in place of Engine 7 as it needed to be assessed, and they immediately got the standby engine up and running and started bringing the feeders back online. We always try to have a backup so when you lose one, you switch to another backup engine,” he said.

Currently, Watson said, Engine 7 is still under assessment.

Watson says the way CUC’s current power system is designed, once the emergency stop button is pushed on any one of CUC’s engines, it shuts down all feeders as a safety measure.

“The system did what it was supposed to do when the operators hit that emergency shut down so that there wasn’t any damage to the engine then they bring in the standby engine and got it back up and running. The system automatically brought the feeders back online starting with Feeder 1 which serves the hospital,” he said.

Due to this occurrence, however, CUC’s team is going to be reengineering its system to ensure that the emergency stop button, when initiated, shuts down a limited number of feeders instead of an island-wide shut down.

“Everything is running normal now, our staff is currently reengineering the Programmable Logic Controller so that the whole island won’t shut down in the future once this program revision is done so that it will limit which feeders go down instead of the whole island. That way, that’ll be less time and effort to bring everything back up and running,” he said.

As for CUC’s Power Plant operators, Watson commends them for working expeditiously.

“CUC operators handled the situation very well and in an expeditious manner. The operators did what they were trained to do when they hear a loud noise from any of the engines,” he said.

Kevin Watson