The Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority is proceeding with a $4.8 million project to underground electrical lines on Queen Street in Christiansted, St. Croix, marking a significant step in hardening the territory’s power infrastructure against severe weather.
The initiative, funded through the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, represents the kind of resilience investment that experts say the entire territory needs. For St. Thomas residents watching from across the water, the project offers both a glimpse into WAPA’s longer-term vision and a stark reminder of the vulnerability that above-ground power systems pose to hurricane-prone communities.
A Proven Problem, A Costly Fix
Overhead electrical lines have been a persistent liability in the U.S. Virgin Islands. During major hurricanes, downed power lines leave entire neighborhoods without electricity for weeks or months. The cascading effects ripple through hospitals, businesses, water systems and residents’ daily lives.
Undergrounding addresses this directly. By placing electrical infrastructure underground, utilities reduce exposure to wind damage, flying debris and fallen trees—the primary culprits in post-hurricane outages. The tradeoff is cost. Underground systems require substantial upfront investment in trenching, conduit installation and specialized equipment.
The Queen Street project on St. Croix targets Feeder 1A, a critical electrical distribution line serving Christiansted Town. That’s why federal disaster recovery funds helped unlock the $4.8 million investment. The Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, administered through the VI Disaster Recovery office, prioritizes projects that reduce future storm damage and protect public infrastructure.
St. Thomas Still Waiting
St. Thomas, home to the territory’s largest population and economic center, relies almost entirely on overhead distribution lines. Recent WAPA contracts show undergrounding work underway on St. Croix—including the Feeder 9A Phase I project also managed by contractor Haugland VI—but comparable efforts on St. Thomas remain limited.
That gap is not lost on residents and officials. The Public Services Commission, which regulates WAPA’s rates and service, has fielded complaints about service reliability. Infrastructure experts have pointed to aging, above-ground systems as a primary vulnerability in the territory’s energy resilience strategy.
WAPA’s Integrated Resource Plan, last revised in 2020, outlined long-term modernization needs across both islands. Implementation has proceeded unevenly, driven largely by the availability of federal recovery funding tied to recent hurricanes rather than a full territory-wide timeline.
Federal Money Driving Progress
The timing of these projects hinges on disaster recovery dollars. Hazard Mitigation Grant Program funds flow to projects that demonstrably reduce future disaster losses. That creates both opportunity and constraint: money exists for resilience work, but only for specific scopes and timelines tied to documented recovery needs.
WAPA’s active contracts list shows multiple undergrounding and infrastructure projects underway on St. Croix in 2026. St. Thomas projects, by contrast, focus on debris removal, consulting services and equipment procurement rather than major distribution system upgrades.
The disparity reflects partly the staggered nature of recovery work and partly the complexity of undergrounding in St. Thomas’s denser urban and commercial corridors. Christiansted’s Queen Street project, while significant, operates in a more confined geographic area than a comparable effort would require on St. Thomas.
Questions About Equity and Timeline
The uneven pace of infrastructure investment across islands raises questions about equitable resource allocation. St. Croix’s Feeder 1A and Feeder 9A projects will improve resilience for those communities. But St. Thomas residents—who experienced the same hurricanes and face the same vulnerability—continue to depend on the same overhead systems that failed after recent storms.
WAPA officials have not announced a specific timeline for comparable undergrounding work on St. Thomas. Future projects will likely depend on the availability of additional federal funding, utility budget capacity and prioritization decisions by the Authority.
For now, the St. Croix investment serves as a proof of concept: undergrounding is technically feasible, fundable and strategically valuable in the territory’s hurricane recovery strategy. Whether St. Thomas sees similar work in the coming years will depend on how aggressively WAPA and territorial leaders pursue additional resilience funding and how they sequence competing infrastructure needs across the islands.
