‘Unacceptable situation’: Minister cries foul as Jamaica suffers blackout

Minister Daryl Vaz reassures residents that power had been restored across Jamaica after a rare islandwide outage.

Jamaica has emerged from a rare islandwide power outage that struck the Caribbean nation overnight.

On Saturday morning, Daryl Vaz, Jamaica’s minister of energy, telecommunications and transport, announced that he had received an update that “all affected customers have been restored”.

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He added that residents should contact him if they are struggling with “isolated issues” related to the blackout. But he and Prime Minister Andrew Holness both shared statements online communicating that the situation was “unacceptable”.

Only one business controls electricity distribution on the island: the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS), a firm that was briefly nationalised in the 20th century, before switching back to private hands.

JPS reported that the islandwide blackout began at about 9pm local time on Friday (2:00 GMT Saturday).

“Our teams will be working throughout the night to restore additional customers as safely and quickly as possible,” it said at the time.

Jamaica is an island with 2.8 million people. The sudden blackout, happening right at the start of the Atlantic hurricane season, quickly spurred alarm about how the electrical grid might withstand a future weather event.

JPS has said it is “investigating the cause of the cause of this incident”. No official explanation was provided as of Saturday morning.

By 2am on Saturday (7:00 GMT), the company said that 20 percent of customers, or 140,000 people, had seen power restored in areas like Kingston, St Andrew and Clarendon.

Three hours later, Minister Vaz shared an update that electricity had returned to 500,000 of JPS’s 700,000 customers overnight. The rest were to be restored in the coming hours, he added.

Still, he called an emergency meeting with government and JPS officials to discuss the blackout and added that a news briefing would follow.

“I have been closely monitoring the situation all night and will continue to do so until full restoration is completed,” Vaz wrote on his social media platform. “I commit to keeping the nation advised and updated on this UNACCEPTABLE SITUATION.”

According to a government statement, Vaz has “demanded a full report from the JPS within 24 hours, including an outline of what caused the power outage”.

It is unusual for Jamaica to experience an islandwide power outage, except in cases of weather emergencies.

Last October, for instance, Hurricane Melissa struck the island, knocking the electrical grid offline in parts of the country.

A powerful Category 5 storm, Melissa caused billions of dollars in damage and killed dozens of people.

As of December, the government had confirmed 45 deaths directly related to the hurricane, with 32 deaths still under investigation. Thirteen people also remained unaccounted for at the time.