The imminent hurricane season will arrive to find that only 22 per cent of wooden utility poles have been replaced with stronger concrete ones, the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPSCo) said in a frank assessment.

After Hurricane Gilbert left Jamaica without light and power for up to four months in some areas in 1988, the JPSCo took a decision to replace its 250,000 wooden poles with concrete ones which can withstand 150 miles per hour wind, against the 120 mph winds of the wooden ones.

“From 1999, until now we have covered only 22 per cent of that, which is approximately 50,000, so that can give an idea of how many more years we have left to go,” Desmond Jones, head of the JPSCo’s Department for Distribution Operation Services, told the Observer.

With experts predicting a very active hurricane season this year, the JPSCo would not reach its yearly quota of replacing 5,000 poles before the season starts in June.

“There are some things that are seasonal and we try to target everything so that by the time the season starts we would more or less have a handle on what is to be done, but there is no way we can finish the quota we have for the year before the start of the hurricane season,” Jones admitted.

Jones was also uncertain as to when the JPSCo would be able to replace all 250,000 poles, if ever.

“There are some areas for which we will never ever be able to replace the wood poles with concrete poles and it’s mainly because of the terrain,” he said.

“It might not be physically possible to carry the concrete pole there or the terrain itself might be so unstable that a concrete pole might not be the best thing to put there. So there are some areas for which even long after I die, there will still be wooden poles,” he said.

However, he expected that “somewhere close to 90 per cent of the 250,000 poles” would be changed eventually, as part of the company’s Structural Integrity Programme (SIP).

Jones said areas for replacement were selected on a highest need basis. “…We do an analysis of what had happened the year before and this will give us an idea of where our problem areas are; based on that information we would do some more detailed patrolling in those areas which will tell where the defects are and then we would change it and move on to the next area,” he said.

On the plus side, Jones said the SIP programme had borne fruit as the JPSCo was able to restore power supply one month after Hurricane Ivan, in comparison to the four months that it took after Gilbert. One spin-off had been the ability to detect and remove illegal connections to the company’s grid.

The JPSCo replaces each pole at a current cost of $80,000, inclusive of labour and related fixtures.