Sections of St Ann without electricity since Monday, JPS working to restore power

The Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) says electricity will be restored this afternoon to sections of St Ann that have been without power since Monday morning. 

Residents of Mount Zion, Mines, and Llandovery have complained that they have been suffering since then.

The upset residents say the unexplained outage has caused meats, vegetables and other food items to go bad in their refrigerators and has also affected students doing online classes.

Shaneel Sterling told The Gleaner that she and other residents of Mount Zion have made several calls to JPS since the power went from about 9:00 a.m. on Monday.

“I’ve been calling to find out the cause of it for quite some time and still no report about it,” Sterling said. 

“I spoke to a lady and she gave me a code to follow up the report because she logged the report again, over and over. My sister called the same way and it was the same thing,” she added.

She indicated that residents have suffered losses since the outage.  

“Pertaining to poultry and meat, they are spoilt. Vegetables have to be thrown away. My neighbour’s deep freeze has turned into a swimming pool because all the ice turned to water. People who rise chickens here and have to store the meat in the deep freeze, you know those are spoilt.” 

Contacted by The Gleaner, Director, Corporate Communications at JPS, Winsome Callum, said the company is working to address the issue.

“We are aware of the situation and have been in dialogue with community representatives, including the mayor, councillor and NGO reps,” Callum stated.

“The outage was caused by a failed transformer. We have had some challenges in our efforts to address the problem. However, we can assure the residents that the situation will be resolved by late this afternoon,” she continued. 

- Carl Gilchrist

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