(Kingston – October 27, 2025) JPS has advised that its teams will continue to restore power in communities across the island being affected by adverse weather, as long as it is safe for crews to work. There has been an increased incidence of outages across the island as a result of deteriorating weather conditions influenced by the pending arrival of Category 5 Hurricane Melissa.
President and CEO at the power company, Hugh Grant, announced that his teams continue to respond to reports and carry out repairs. “Our teams are working to restore supply to as many of the affected customers as possible. JPS employees and local contractors are being supported by the overseas line workers who have already been deployed to several parishes. We understand the inconvenience of losing power, but while we make every effort to keep the lights on, we are seeing an increasing number of outages caused by persons cutting trees inappropriately and causing them to fall on power lines,” he explained.
He continued: “As the hurricane approaches, our priority is to keep the lights on for as long as it is safe to do so. But we need members of the public to do their part, and stay away from power lines. Just this afternoon, we got the sad news of an electrocution when a billboard being removed made contact with a power line. This is a sad and unnecessary tragedy,” Grant noted.
“In the last 24 hours, just over 52,000 or about 7.5% of our 700,000 customers were impacted by outages. We have so far restored service to more than 30,000 of those affected, and work continues to connect the remaining customers. However, in some cases, restoration is being hampered by access challenges caused by difficult terrain and heavy rains,” Grant said.
The JPS boss cautioned that with weather conditions worsening, at some point the company will no longer be able to respond to individual customer reports. “We will not compromise the safety of our teams, but we give you our commitment that we will be back in the field carrying out restoration work as soon as it is safe to do so,” he stressed.
