CORAL SPRING, Trelawny — Director General of the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR), Ansord Hewitt says customer service-related issues — which have worsened since the the passage of Hurricane Melissa last October — are expected to continue for the remainder of this year.

Several customers of the telecommunications, water, and electricity sectors, which are regulated by the OUR, have voiced increasing complaints about the quality of service they are getting, particularly since the Category 5 storm, but Hewitt says they will see a gradual improvement.

“I think… the customer service issues are clearly going to perhaps be with us for the rest of the year, with improvement as we go along, but it does seem like we are going to have those issues throughout the rest of this year. — hopefully, I expect, at reducing levels,” Hewitt told the
Jamaica Observer Thursday on the sidelines of the Organization of Caribbean Utility Regulators (OOCUR) 2026 Conference, at Ocean Coral Spring Resort in Trelawny.

According to Hewitt, quality of service issues have been the major complaint received by the OUR since Melissa.

He attributed some of the challenges faced by customers of the utility companies to accelerated restoration efforts after the storm.

“It provides little comfort, but there is a logic to it. Because in the rush to restore — because the imperative is to restore electricity as quickly as possible, to restore water, to restore your telecommunications, ICT [information and communication technology] infrastructure, as quickly as possible — in that rush, you are going to have a neglect of quality.

“Sometimes you are doing shortcuts [when] the urgency is to get power. Plus, clearly because there are certain vital infrastructure on the grid that have to be rebuilt, the same thing for the telecommunications networks, and those take times,” Hewitt explained.

“Once the full restoration has taken place there is still the matter of cleaning up and making sure that you get back to the quality of service. And truth be told, we had quality of service issues before the hurricane, so that would only have exacerbated in the restoration work,”added Hewitt.

He said the OUR is pushing utility companies to attend to those customer service-related issues as quickly as possible.

“But we had to strike a balance between… do we get them to focus the resources on completing the restoration while saying… the public will be prepared to tolerate a certain deterioration in their service standard in order to secure restoration? But that can’t continue for too long,” admitted the OUR head.

He pointed out that the initial restoration of utility services following Hurricane Beryl, which hit Jamaica in July 2024, took between four and five months, and most companies indicated then that they would need another six months to restore their customer service levels to what they were before the storm.

“With Melissa now we are pretty much… close to 100 restoration. As I said, for electricity [it] is 99 point whatever [per cent restoration] while water is a little below that,” said Hewitt as he noted that the utility companies have taken six months after the Category 5 storm to get to that level.

The OOCUR conference ran from April 27 to May 1 under the theme: ‘Navigating Caribbean Regulatory Challenges: Opportunities, Innovations and Collaborations’.