Experts Contracted to Probe July 15 Blackout to Arrive Next Week

The government has concluded arrangements to host a team of experts from Canada, who will conduct investigations into the power outage that plunged the island into darkness on July 15.
Information and Development Minister, Senator Colin Campbell, who made the announcement at yesterday’s (July 31) post-Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House, said that the five-member team would arrive in the island next week and their investigations would cover the regulatory operations as well as the administration processes of the Jamaica Public Service (JPS). “The preliminary schedule envisages that the enquiry will begin with the technical and engineering causes and issues, following which attention will be shifted to the administrative, managerial and regulatory aspects of the enquiry,” he told journalists.
Industry, Technology, Energy and Commerce Minister, Phillip Paulwell at the request of Prime Minister, Portia Simpson Miller, had asked the JPS to provide an urgent explanation as to the reason for the blackout.
Not happy with the report made to the government by the management of the JPS, the Prime Minister further instructed Minister Paulwell to secure the services of the Canadian experts to conduct an independent investigation.
At a post-Cabinet press briefing on July 17, Minister Campbell said that, “the Prime Minister insists that the country cannot be comfortable unless we know the specific reasons for the outage as this matter has serious national security and national defence consequences”.
The investigative team will be comprised of members of a United States-Canada task force, which investigated a similar power outage in the New York/Ontario border region in August 2003, said to one of the biggest blackouts in North American history.