KINGSTON, Jamaica — More than a week after Hurricane Melissa swept across Jamaica, leaving widespread destruction to the national power grid, the Jamaica Public Service (JPS) has confirmed it is moving into the final stretch of recovery efforts, with fewer than 3,000 customers still waiting to have their electricity restored. In an official public statement released Friday, the utility provider attributed the steady, significant progress of restoration work to critical operational support from partner energy teams across the Caribbean region.
To date, more than 80 external skilled personnel have joined local JPS crews on the ground to speed up recovery. Line workers from Bermuda’s Bermuda Electric Light Company (BELCO) have been deployed alongside certified technicians from two St. Lucia-based firms: King’s Electrical and Islandwide Electrical Limited. According to JPS, these cross-border teams have played an indispensable role in accelerating restoration, especially in coastal and rural communities that suffered the worst damage from the hurricane’s high winds and flooding.
Right now, all remaining work is concentrated in the western Jamaican parishes of St. Elizabeth and Westmoreland. Crews in these areas are still contending with rugged, hard-to-access terrain damaged by the storm, and are carrying out full reconstruction and partial redesign of large sections of the local power grid that could not be simply repaired.
Ricardo Case, Senior Vice President of Shared Services at JPS, emphasized that coordinated regional collaboration has been a game-changer for overcoming the unprecedented challenges posed by Hurricane Melissa. “We fully recognize how much frustration our customers in western Jamaica are feeling right now, going days without reliable power,” Case said in the statement. “But we have kept our promise: work has not stopped for a single day. Our local teams, reinforced by skilled support from utility partners across the Caribbean, have adapted creatively to restore power to some of the hardest-hit parts of the grid, even with limited access and large-scale rebuilding required. None of this progress would have been possible without these partnerships.”
When Hurricane Melissa made landfall on Jamaica on October 28, 2025, it knocked out power to roughly 77 percent of the country’s utility customers, and caused catastrophic, widespread damage to the national transmission and distribution network. JPS has called the event one of the most damaging storm impacts in the company’s operating history.
Case acknowledged that the final phase of restoration remains extremely demanding work. “But every single one of us shares the same top priority: get power back to every single customer, no exceptions,” he said. “The shared commitment and positive energy of all the crews working side by side will make sure we get this done as safely and as quickly as humanly possible.”