JAMAICA LEFT IN DARKNESS FOR HOURS: Pressure on Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) to explain cause of islandwide outage

Tuesday, August 30, 2016    

PRESSURE is mounting on the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) to explain the cause of the blackout which occurred on Saturday, leaving the entire island in darkness for hours.

Jamaica Public Service

The Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) yesterday asked the light and power monopoly to submit a preliminary report on the outage by the end of the business today. “This is a precursor to a more detailed report which JPS is obliged to give to the OUR within 30 days of restoration of power. This preliminary report is expected to give as much detail as possible on the outage, the extent of the outage, duration, cause, and state of the system restoration,” a release from the regulator said.

The OUR has also summoned the JPS to a meeting set for today to discuss this latest development and its implications.

This is the second islandwide outage that has occurred since the start of the year, with a previous April blackout leaving Jamaicans without power. Director of corporate communications at the JPS, Winsome Callum, told the

Jamaica Observer yesterday that a preliminary overview on the outage was submitted to energy minister Andrew Wheatley on Sunday night, and that the JPS was still evaluating the reasons the grid’s automatic protection mechanism had failed following a system fault.

“The JPS is not taking this incident lightly; the company is now taking a critical look at the applicable policies and procedures, as well as the entire system, with a view to ensuring that measures are taken to reduce the possibility of a recurrence of the incident,” she said,.

Callum said that the JPS has confirmed that the outage was triggered during scheduled maintenance work at the Port Authority of Jamaica substation in Kingston. “The scheduled work was part of ongoing system improvements being done by JPS to our power delivery (transmission and distribution) network. The information that we have so far indicates that there was a breakdown in the implementation of the established operating procedures for the work being done. This triggered a system fault that led to the outage.” she explained. more