Vaz Orders Investigation After Jamaica-Wide JPS Blackout

Energy Minister Daryl Vaz says he plans to brief Jamaicans on Saturday after a nationwide electricity failure, which he called “unacceptable”, disrupted power across the island for close to two hours on Friday night.

Reports of outages across multiple parishes started coming in soon after 8:00 p.m. Vaz later posted “Island-wide blackout” on X, formerly Twitter, at 9:27 p.m.

By 10:37 p.m., the minister issued another update, saying Jamaica Public Service President Hugh Grant had advised that “all power stations [are] being restarted” and that “some customers have started being restored.” Vaz said crews would keep working through the night to bring back electricity.

He said the restoration process is taking place while an initial review is already in progress, but added that a “fulsome investigation” will be carried out to determine why the failure occurred.

JPS, Jamaica’s only electricity supplier, said it activated its incident command centre following what it described as the system failure on Friday night. The company also said it is probing the reason for the outage.

The utility provides electricity to about 700,000 customers islandwide. Jamaica’s population is close to 2.8 million.

JPS infrastructure was badly hit by Hurricane Melissa, which caused major damage in sections of Jamaica in October.