Blackout shame!

ENERGY Minister Daryl Vaz has described last Friday’s islandwide power outage as “an embarrassment” while the Jamaica Public Service (JPS) has blamed lightning damage to critical infrastructure for triggering a cascading grid failure that left the country without electricity and, in some instances, water.

Regulators have given the power company 48 hours to submit a preliminary report and 30 days to provide a full report into the shutdown.

Minister of Water Matthew Samuda, in noting that the supply of water is reliant on electricity, said the team will continue to restore connections over the next 24 to 48 hours to approximately 65,000 customers who were still without water up to 2:00 pm Saturday.

The power outage occurred at approximately 9:02 pm Friday, plunging the country into darkness and disrupting households, businesses, water supply systems, and entertainment activities at the start of the weekend.

Addressing a joint press briefing on Saturday, JPS President and CEO Hugh Grant said the utility company’s initial findings point to severe lightning activity affecting station transmission facilities and substations.

“What we do know is that, as a result of the significant lightning activity, we lost five of our transmission lines emanating from one of our significant substations in the Corporate Area. In parallel to that, we had a cascading effect, causing a loss of generation across the entire island. This cascading effect resulted in the shutdown of the entire grid. At that point, we were mobilised and the team responded,” said Grant.

He explained further: “We saw a fault on one of our transmissions, that’s one of our high-voltage cables connecting our Hunt’s Bay station to our Newport station in Kingston, and we actually saw a broken conductor there as a result of that…We also saw evidence of damage to equipment at our Rockfort substation as a result of these types of activities. So, we are seeing whereby the lightning activity impact[ed] on the grid. A lot more to come and to analyse exactly what transpired; the timing and the sequencing, but we do see and know that there are some known faults on the system that line up with some of this activity that we saw.”

Addressing the associated loss of water, Minister Samuda said the Minard system, which supplies Brown’s Town, heading in the direction of Runaway Bay, St Ann, is currently experiencing some challenges and teams from both JPS and the National Water Commission are on site to rectify the issue, which is affecting some 30,000 people.

“As we speak, it is a situation that is evolving, and we would say evolving positively. What I want persons, again, to understand and listen, nothing that affects JPS, National Water Commission is immune from, so having the outage that we would have had, it will take some 24 to 48 hours to fully restore water as it relates to the power outage,” said Samuda.

“We have to backfill our lines, we have to recharge those lines, and we have to ensure that we fill all of our community storage tanks that we are able to supply. We expect that later tonight [Saturday] we will be able to provide another update that will show significant reductions in the number of customers out,” he added.

As he apologised to citizens for the inconvenience, Minister Vaz said the outage was unfortunate and unacceptable. He acknowledged that the islandwide blackout caused significant disruption across Jamaica.

“This, for me as minister, is an embarrassment and one that I would not wish to experience again in my tenure in this position. I must say that when I got the call last night, I worked through the night with the [JPS] president straight back until 6 o’clock this [Saturday] morning, and he had his teams out there, but we lost a good night’s sleep that we should not have lost because the system should have been in a position that if there was one area that went down, it should not have caused the entire system to go down. Something went awry. There’s absolutely no two ways about that,” said Vaz.

Matthew Samuda, Minister of Water, Environment and Climate Change, speaks to members of the media during a joint press briefing at JPS corporate office in New Kingston on Saturday following an islandwide power outage on Friday night. (Photo: Joseph Wellington)

He added that the Government expects transparency, accountability, and clear answers, and remains committed to ensuring a reliable and resilient electricity system for all Jamaicans.

Defending the response of the power company, Grant said that, within an hour after the blackout, the JPS response team was mobilised, with some of its backup systems facilitating the restoration of power on the western side of the island and then the east. The company’s entire grid was restored by 6:00 am on Saturday, he said.

He noted that, due to inclement weather in the western and central parts of the island, just under 10,000 customers were still without electricity at the time of the 3:00 pm press conference on Saturday. He stressed that this was a separate incident from the customers that were affected as a result of the islandwide blackout.

“Now, at this stage, we’ll transition into the investigatory phase to understand exactly what transpired, capture the learnings from that, and then, more importantly, have the follow-up action so we can reduce the likelihood of any recurrence. We’re very much committed to doing this. We understand the sensitivity of a significant event of this nature, and we will not stop until we get to the bottom of it and we transfer it — in terms of the learnings, the findings — and how we go forward from there,” said the JPS CEO.

Director general of the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) Ansord Hewitt said the utility company has a 48-hour window to present a preliminary report on the outage, and 30 days for a more extensive report.

“The regulatory framework provides 30 days for JPS to do essentially an incident report, setting out what transpired in our root cause analysis, providing us with recommendations, and so on, which we will review and see the extent and if it is adequate. We will also determine what directives, what actions, to take coming out of that…We’re going to continue to monitor the situation,” Hewitt said.

“We want to ensure that the system is stable going forward and that, as we have done in the past, learn from this incident as well, and part of the analysis that will take place is the extent to which there has been full compliance and full accountability for any directive — any lessons — that were gained from previous incidents,” he assured.

In the meantime, Vaz added that, in discussion with the OUR and JPS, he has urged that a full, independent investigation be conducted to determine the cause of the islandwide system failure and ensure that there is not a recurrence.

The minister noted that JPS has a history of islandwide blackouts due to non-hurricane events. According to the minister, findings from OUR investigations show that JPS has had six islandwide major system-wide shutdowns since 2006: one in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2012, and April 2016.

“OUR power system integrity investigation said the factors were typical and those which precipitated the three earlier system shutdowns, including the first major incident in 2006. Protection system failures, relays not operating…defective relays left unreplaced for months, lightning initiated during 2006 and 2012, and like the others started with lightning strikes on transmission lines,” said Vaz.

He further listed human error, poor planning, and no updates from field staff in inadequate risk assessment, maintenance shortcomings and more among the reasons for previous system failures.

“It is too early to say what has happened now. What I can say, very clearly, is that the technology has advanced from 2016 to 2026, dramatically, and, therefore, I would expect that the technology that is driving everything else would be part of what some of the improvements that the JPS has done,” said Vaz, expressing hope that technology will help to shorten the time taken to compile a full review of the June 5, 2026, incident.