Jamaica suffered an islandwide electrical blackout at the start of last weekend, knocking out power to all customers for more than two hours. Officials there are criticizing the blackout after power was restored as the weekend rolled on.
As reported by the Jamaica Gleaner, the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS), which powers the entire island, says that all utility customers lost power last Friday (June 5) at around 9 PM local time.
According to statements from JPS, a system failure caused the blackout, and those systems were still recovering from damage sustained during Hurricane Melissa last October.
Hugh Grant, CEO of the JPS, spoke with journalists in the scramble to restore power in a phased restoration project.
“The thing that we have to learn from right now is what transpired that caused this cascading effect whereby as a result of lightning strikes in one area of the grid, we have a cascading effect of generating outages across the grid,” Grant said at a press conference.
Energy Minister Daryl Vaz is demanding more answers from the JPS to prevent such a thing from happening in the future.
“Something that started in Kingston ended up making its way all the way through to [the] western end of the island. The system should have been in a position where if one area went down, it should not have caused the entire system to go down,” Vaz said at a press conference.
JPS supplies power to over 700,000 customers, and the island houses a population of nearly 2.8 million.
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