Epstein Island utilities: how power, water and supplies reached the island

No airstrip: why every bolt arrived over water

Little St. James has no runway. Getting there means a boat or a helicopter. Epstein's jets touched down at Cyril E. King Airport on St. Thomas, and the last leg to the island's landing pad was flown ^2,1.

Anything that did not fly in needed a working boat. A harbour employee described to CBS News a vessel carrying the three letters LSJ that moved workers and provisions between St. Thomas and the island ².

Heavy plant does not fit on a workboat. A 70 foot transport barge, registered to one of Epstein's transport companies, lay at Crown Bay Marina in the autumn of 2017 ⁴. Material, vehicles, tanks and machinery came over that way.

Federal aviation records in the file release show Epstein's air company buying a Bell 430 on 6 March 2012 for US$1.58 million ¹⁶. CBS News reports two helicopters operated from the island ².

Good to knowThe useful unit here is not the metre but the crossing.

Power: from costly diesel to a cable to Cabrita Point

It began with diesel. The island ran on generators, and their fuel cost tens of thousands of dollars a month according to a former contractor who handled the technical side there for six years ¹.

Around 2005 the arithmetic tipped. Epstein paid the territory's water and power authority to order a far more expensive hybrid cable, carrying current and fibre optic in one run to Cabrita Point at the east end of St. Thomas ¹.

The cable alone did not finish the job. The telephone company had no fibre beyond Cowpet Bay, so Epstein paid for that build out on St. Thomas as well ¹. The former contractor called the cost astronomical.

Before that the island hung on a microwave dish picking up a signal from Crown Mountain, with calls breaking off ¹. A telephone line to a remote cabana ran to about US$25,000, and a drum of 2,000 feet of fibre came from Florida by express freight because the sea route took a week ¹.

The trade is plain. A submarine cable is expensive once and cheap afterwards; diesel is cheap to install and expensive forever. Anyone who means to stay ends up with the cable. The technical buildings appear on the map of the buildings.

Water: a cistern rule, rain catchment and a plant of its own

Fresh water is short in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Since 1 May 1964 no building there may be put up, enlarged or moved without a self sustaining supply, a well or a rainwater catchment with a cistern, unless it is tied to the mains ⁹.

The minimum sizes sit in the statute: 10 gallons of usable capacity per square foot of roof on single storey dwellings, apartments and hotels, 15 gallons from two storeys upward, 4.5 gallons for other buildings ⁹.

Little St. James went further and made water from the sea. An email of 8 May 2013, in the tranche published at the end of January 2026, names the island's seawater reverse osmosis plant in its subject line and reports a pH running too high, which required an extra dosing pump ¹³.

A service report from February 2014, by a firm in Florida, lists instrument calibration, the batching of pretreatment chemicals and new tubing on the sulfuric acid feed pump ¹³.

On 6 December 2018 a wire transfer of US$4,373.17 went to a supplier in Florida: six drums of sulfuric acid at 55 gallons each with freight, materials for conductivity probes, a replacement pH sensor ¹³. Acid lowers the pH of the feed water and keeps carbonate off the membranes. A different reading of that transfer circulated online in February 2026; the documents support maintenance and nothing more ¹³.

The 2022 listing puts it more briefly as high capacity water filtration ³. Satellite imagery from 2019 to 2025 shows a basin, probably the only freshwater source for the people living there, nearly run dry and full again by 2025 ¹².

Fuel, spare parts, staff: what running it day after day takes

The fullest inventory comes from the sales listing, which is exactly where care is needed. The description that went to market in 2022 counts, across 71.6 acres, a helipad, a private dock, a gas station, high capacity water filtration, two pools, the main compound, four guest villas, three beaches and a tiki hut ³. This is sales copy, not an official inventory.

A 2023 summary adds a cinema and a lagoon with flamingos from the same marketing ¹⁵. Two entries matter here: the gas station, a fuel store on site, and the filtration, chemicals, membranes and spares on a shelf.

Diesel and chemicals arrive in drums and on pallets, over the dock and by barge ^4,3. Service crews work to weather windows, and parts sit on the island, because a failed pump otherwise stays failed for days.

And it takes people. Staff lived on the island and looked after the plant, and residents were still described in 2025 as users of the freshwater basin ^1,12. On Great St. James the planned counterpart, barge dock and marine cable included, never left the application stage.

September 2017: when the cable leads nowhere

On 6 September 2017 Hurricane Irma passed over the northern Virgin Islands as a Category 5 storm. Charlotte Amalie measured sustained winds of 51 knots and gusts to 85 knots, and the National Hurricane Center recorded catastrophic damage across St. Thomas and St. John ^5,6.

Two weeks later, on 20 September 2017, Hurricane Maria came ashore in southeastern Puerto Rico as a high end Category 4 storm and struck the Virgin Islands too ⁷.

That was the real test. By the territorial government's account more than 55,000 customers of the water and power authority lost their connection; roughly 90 percent were back by Christmas 2017, the rest only by mid March 2018 ⁸. FEMA reimbursed the utility US$679 million for emergency work, and the rebuild put critical lines underground and set the system to withstand 200 miles per hour ⁸.

A submarine cable is only as sturdy as the grid behind it. In such weeks the generator, the fuel store and the cistern matter again ^8,9.

The resupply route took damage too. The marina at Crown Bay sued the transport company in U.S. District Court for US$160,473 in repairs plus more than US$70,000 for emergency work, arguing the barge had been poorly secured before Irma and had damaged docks, piles and fittings ⁴. That is the plaintiff's account; the outcome is not available here. The order of events sits in the island timeline.

The picture in 2026: a concrete hall with a cistern beneath it

The buyer of 2023 has filed exactly one building application, and it concerns utilities. In December 2025 a request for a coastal zone major permit for a warehouse of 8,800 square feet reached the authority. The papers describe rebuilding an existing metal framed warehouse in concrete with a new cistern under the floor, and the site plans replace several small metal sheds with one semicircular structure ¹¹.

On 5 February 2026 CZM Director Marlon Hibbert declared the application incomplete because the environmental assessment was missing ¹¹. Newsweek noted in the same month that no other building applications exist ¹⁴. The resort of 25 rooms announced for 2025 has not been built ¹¹.

One detail deserves attention: the building code exempts warehouses of all things from the minimum cistern capacity ⁹. Here a cistern is planned anyway, below the floor ¹¹. On an island without a water main, storage is the scarcest commodity, and a warehouse floor the cheapest roof over it.

The satellite comparison from 2019 to 2025 found the main buildings barely altered, but a small structure on the beach, an extension towards the dock and a basin filled up again ¹². Work is going into infrastructure, not into a hotel. What changed hands in 2023 is set out in the article on the 2023 sale.