The story headlined ‘Light at last’ in this week’s Sunday Observer captures in colourful detail people’s joy at the restoration of electricity following Hurricane Melissa’s rampage through western Jamaica in late October.

Focused on Potsdam, where iconic all-boys’ school Munro College is located high in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the article represents useful education for those least affected by the Category 5 storm, widely considered the most powerful and destructive in Jamaica’s recorded history.

For Potsdam residents, unable to afford petrol-powered and/or environmentally-friendly solar electricity generation, the total darkness at night was bad enough. Equally demoralising was the effect on professionals and business people who require electricity to function properly. Also, the loss of simple, long-taken-for-granted conveniences, such as refrigeration, upended people’s lives, since storing perishables became impossible. Hence the cry from Potsdam responder Mr Damian Keane to our reporter Ms Tamoy Ashman: “You know how long I want [to enjoy] a Sunday-Monday [dinner]?…”

That’s a reference to the habit of ‘heating up’ refrigerated leftovers from a massive Sunday afternoon meal for dinner on Monday.

As Ms Lasmin Davis, another Potsdam resident, told our reporter, the return of electricity has removed annoyances and complications connected to food storage.

“Now I can stock up on meat and cook whatever I want…” she said.

Yet, even with gratitude came questions about the length of time it has taken for electricity provider, Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) to restore service in places like Potsdam, relatively far away from the eye of Hurricane Melissa which came ashore in eastern Westmoreland.

As Mr Everoy Foster pointed out, so far as Potsdam residents could see, Melissa did far less damage to JPS installations than did Hurricane Beryl, which passed close to Jamaica’s southern coastline in early July 2024.

Said Mr Foster in relation to Melissa’s impact on his community and JPS’s subsequent restoration efforts: “No light post nuh drop and we have to wait so long?…”

It’s a question on many a lip, not just in Potsdam but elsewhere in the west. It shouldn’t be such a difficult question for JPS to answer since, as we have observed previously, its energy sources and transmission lines located closer to Melissa’s eye were extensively damaged.

What’s needed is for JPS to communicate in simple, straightforward fashion to its affected customers on the ground. As we have suggested previously, those people need no sugar-coating. They experienced Melissa.

That aside, it’s worth noting that for people now in their late 50s and older, who grew up in deep rural Jamaica, having to cope without electricity was a way of life. As Westmoreland resident, 73-year-old Mr Jason McKenzie told Ms Ashman in mid-December, lighting during his youth was provided by kerosene lamps.

Without unduly burdening the reader, let’s consider the degree of difficulty for schoolchildren using such lighting to study and do homework and for teachers marking papers. It was extreme.

Older Jamaicans will no doubt recall that electricity was only ‘universalised’ across the country following launch of the transformative Rural Electrification Programme by the Michael Manley-led People’s National Party Government of the 1970s.

In a real sense then, travail/trauma from electricity loss since the passage of Melissa more than three months ago should help as a measure of Jamaica’s advance over the last half a century.