Sections of Jamaica without power due to Tropical Storm Rafael

By Kimone Witter    

 

The Jamaica Public Service Company has been responding to outages across the island caused by Tropical Storm Rafael.

 

Winsome Callum, Director of Corporate Communications at the JPS, says the incidents are not widespread. 

 

"Not a large number of persons are out at the moment but there are pockets across the island. It's too early to say what the full impact on the system is, but right now we're seeing outages in St. James, in Mandeville, in St. Elizabeth, Manchester and also in St. Andrew, rural St. Andrew. I know there are pockets elsewhere that I haven't listed, where we have maybe small numbers of customers on a street or in a small community that are out. We are getting that information together now so that we will be able to respond," she said Tuesday while speaking on the Morning Agenda, on Power 106. 

 

In the meantime, Ms. Callum said the JPS activated its Incident Command Operations on Sunday following the projections that Tropical Storm Rafael would have approached Jamaica from the south.

 

This is similar to the path taken by Hurricane Beryl in July which caused major disruption to electricity and telecommunications services.

 

Ms. Callum said, with the trauma from the hurricane still fresh and the power company still recovering, it has built on some of the lessons learned.

 

She noted that the central command will allow for a swift and efficient response to incidents. 

 

"When you have a central command operation, you are able to direct the response across the island and that's what we have been doing. So we have deployed our internal teams and we have activated our contractors right across the island because this is expected to affect the entire island. So we have our contractors on standby in every parish. We have our regular operations teams and we have persons from other teams who have automatically stepped into what we call storm roles, who are ready and on standby to start the restoration process as soon as we are able," she explained.