Mark Beckford, Gleaner Writer

The Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) will not face sanctions despite a report by a team of Canadian consultants which implies that the company was at fault for the all-island power outage on July 15, 2006.

The findings cited the JPS at fault for not properly maintaining the protection mechanisms to protect its systems from short circuiting. The report, which was commissioned by the Government, was tabled in Parliament last week.

Islandwide blackout

The audit looked into the circumstances which triggered an islandwide blackout after lightning struck a steel tower at the Duncans/Bogue transmission link in Trelawny. Failure of the protective mechanisms to respond led to the collapse of the system.

But director general of the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR), J. Paul Morgan, said the light and power company did not breach either the guaranteed or overall standards and as such would not be receiving any immediate sanctions.

"I don't believe there was a breach of the overall standards, because the outage was precipitated by a lightning strike."

Sanctions

The OUR head said sanctions would only arise if the JPS did not carry out the recommendations it had given in the allotted time.

"They (JPS) have been cooperating fully with us and they have been doing everything we have told them to do and they have been providing us with reports on the various projects they have completed to date," Mr. Morgan said.

He said, too, that the company could be made to pay when a review of tariff rates is done in 2009. "The sanction that the JPS will see is what happens when we start to look at any subsequent tariffs in terms of their performance - so we will measure them at that point in time."

The Jamaica Public Service released a statement on the weekend stating that it "has put corrective measures in place to address the immediate causes of the system shutdown, as well as to reduce the possibility of a recurrence."