KINGSTON, Jamaica — In the wake of a crippling island-wide power outage that disrupted daily life across Jamaica, the country’s Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) has launched a targeted internal task force to lead a full investigation into the incident, marking the next formal step after the state-owned utility provider Jamaica Public Service Company Limited (JPS) turned over its initial findings on the blackout.
The newly formed specialist team carries a broad set of mandated responsibilities, the OUR outlined in an official statement. Beyond setting clear guidance for JPS as the company continues its own internal probe, the group will handle all pre-investigation preparations, conduct a rigorous audit of JPS’s upcoming final report, and verify the credibility of the utility’s conclusions. It will also assess whether JPS’s proposed corrective measures and policy recommendations align with regulatory requirements and public safety needs.
The task force has also been granted full authority to assess resource needs for the investigation, including approval to contract independent external experts if necessary to guarantee a comprehensive, unbiased examination of the blackout. Additionally, the team is tasked with developing its own independent recommendations and flagging any regulatory interventions that may be needed to prevent similar outages in the future.
In its release, the regulator emphasized that no findings, policy actions, or enforcement measures will be drawn from JPS’s preliminary document. The initial report, regulators explained, only provides limited insight into the underlying causes of the system-wide collapse, making it insufficient to base any final conclusions on.
Despite these limitations, OUR Director-General Ansord E. Hewitt noted that the preliminary submission serves as a valuable foundational step for the full investigation. “The preliminary report, however is a helpful signpost to alert the OUR to immediate post-restoration concerns, and to enable the regulator to give further directions to JPS as to the expected scope and the critical inputs that must be addressed in JPS’s investigation and reflected in the final detailed report, which is due within thirty days of the full restoration of electricity,” Hewitt explained in the statement.
In its initial filing, JPS offered regulators reassurance that early reviews of grid operations and post-outage adjustments have not uncovered any immediate or lingering threats to the stability of Jamaica’s electrical grid.
According to JPS’s preliminary analysis, the outage was triggered by a series of unexpected failures on critical transmission infrastructure in Jamaica’s Corporate Area, which coincided with a period of severe weather that brought heavy rain and frequent lightning strikes. The company’s early probe points to a potential misoperation of the primary protection system linked to the Hunts Bay-Rockfort 69kV transmission line. Officials said this malfunction, combined with other contributing factors, led to extended unaddressed fault conditions that triggered a chain reaction of generator outages, ultimately resulting in the total system shutdown that cut power to every parish on the island.