KINGSTON, Jamaica — A sudden strike of lightning sparked an unforeseen cascading system failure that left the entire island of Jamaica without power from late Friday into Saturday morning, and the national power provider has launched a full probe to pinpoint the root causes of the unprecedented outage, company leadership confirmed Saturday.
During a press conference held at the Jamaica Public Service (JPS) headquarters, Hugh Grant, JPS president and chief executive officer, detailed the sequence of events that led to the total grid shutdown. The initial lightning strike knocked out five critical transmission lines connected to a major substation serving Jamaica’s corporate area. Instead of being contained to the affected zone, the disruption spread uncontrollably through the power network in a cascading effect, which eventually shut down power generation facilities across the entire island, bringing the full national grid offline.
Grant emphasized that this widespread cascading shutdown was an event the utility never anticipated. “This is not an outcome we expected to see from a localized lightning strike,” he said. “Our priority right now is unpacking exactly what went wrong to allow this cascade to spread across the entire grid. That is the key lesson we need to capture moving forward.”
Despite the severity of the total blackout, Grant noted that backup contingency systems performed as designed. Within an hour of the grid going down, JPS technical crews were able to execute manual “black start” procedures to restart key power generators, restoring electricity to priority areas almost immediately. Phased restoration work continued through the overnight hours, and all customers had their service reconnected by late Saturday morning.
Energy, Transport and Telecommunications Minister Daryl Vaz previously described the full island outage as “unacceptable” as JPS launched its phased restoration work. Speaking alongside Vaz at Saturday’s briefing was Water, Environment and Climate Change Minister Matthew Samuda, signaling the government’s close attention to the high-impact incident.
Grant said the company would now move into a formal investigatory phase to map out every step of the outage, document key takeaways from the event, and implement concrete corrective actions to lower the risk of a similar widespread outage happening again. “We will not stop working until we get to the bottom of this incident,” Grant stated. “We are committed to full transparency around our findings, the lessons we learn, and the changes we will make to improve grid resilience going forward.”