KINGSTON, Jamaica— President and chief executive officer of the Jamaica Public Service (JPS) Hugh Grant says the company is looking into a “cascading” shutdown effect set off by lightning that caused the islandwide blackout experienced Friday night into Saturday morning, describing the phenomenon as unexpected.

“We lost five of our transmission lines emanating from one of our significant substations in the corporate area.  In parallel with that, we had a cascading effect, causing a loss of generation across the entire island. This cascading effect resulted in a shutdown of the entire grid,” the Grant said Saturday afternoon during a press conference.

He noted that the incident is not something the power company had foreseen.

“The thing that we have to learn from right now is exactly what transpired that caused this cascade effect, where as a result of lightning strikes in one area of the grid, we have a cascading effect of generating outages across the grid. That is not something that we would expect to happen,” he admitted.

READ: JPS begins phased restoration of electricity after ‘unacceptable’ all-island blackout – Vaz

Despite this, the JPS president said backup systems worked as expected with crews able to manually restart certain generators or ‘black start’ within an hour of the blackout, to restore power to some areas. This process continued throughout the night, and customers were reconnected by late Saturday morning.

Stressing that he was aware of the severity of the event, Grant said,
“At this stage, we’ll transition into the investigatory phase to understand exactly what transpired, capture the learnings from that, and then, more importantly, have the follow-up action, so we can reduce the likelihood of any reoccurrence.

“We will not stop until we get to the bottom of it and be transparent in terms of the learnings, the findings, and how we go forward from there,” he said.

Minister of Energy, Transport and Telecommunications Daryl Vaz  was also at the briefing, held at the Jamaica Public Service (JPS) Company headquarters, alongside Minister of Water, Environment and Climate Change Matthew Samuda.