The CEO of the American Samoa Power Authority Wallon Young has apologized for the island wide blackout that occurred at 4:35 Monday morning.
Explaining the outage, Young said in a statement that an underground cable fault on Feeder-5 in front of the Tafuna power plant caused all four GE gen-sets at the Tafuna plant to auto-trip. This in turn overloaded and took down the Satala power plant because the island’s entire load was transferred to it.
The Feeder-5 protection relay registered a record high fault current of 6,134 amps. “This high-current fault so close to the generation source is damaging – because of the high energy release at the point of the fault and the excessive thermal and mechanical stress placed on the generator windings,” said Young.
The Satala plant was fully restored at 4:53am or 18 minutes after the blackout.
The Tafuna plant was restored 70 minutes later at 5:45am.
Underground cable repairs were completed at 11 a.m. and Feeder-5 was fully restored at 11:05 a.m.
