Jamaica Public Service Outage: Kingston (Resolved)

Incident details

(Kingston – January 18, 2026) As part of the critical “last mile” of electricity restoration efforts following the passage of Category 5 Hurricane Melissa, JPS has been undertaking extensive work to rebuild its transmission network – the backbone of the electricity grid. The disclosure was made at a meeting between the JPS leadership team and Councillors from the St. Elizabeth Municipal Corporation on Wednesday January 14. The transmission system, which carries high-voltage electricity from power plants to substations across the Island, suffered tremendous damage when the hurricane made landfall on October 28 last year. President and CEO of JPS, Hugh Grant, revealed that over the past couple of weeks, hundreds of line workers have been assigned to focus specifically on restoring transmission belts across the western parishes, with just over 200 line workers assigned to the breadbasket parish. “There is an order to how our remaining customers will be onboarded,” Grant said. “We first have to fix the transmission lines, which take power to the substations. Once the substations are energized, they step down the power to a voltage that can be safely distributed to the communities,” he