A LOSS of power spanning sections of the Corporate Area from Half-Way Tree to downtown Kingston caused traffic signal shutdowns and led to huge a traffic pile-up for hours yesterday.
Throughout the day, storeowners across the city resorted once more to putting generators on the outside of their stores as they prepared to keep business going.
In many areas, power returned by 3:00 p.m., but at 5:00 pm JPSCo was still issuing apologies about outages in other areas.
The outage, which affected the city through intervals most of yesterday, was caused by "a problem in the system affecting customers in the Corporate Area," according to the JPSCo.
The company apologised for the inconvenience and said it was taking steps to return supplies as quickly as possible.
The electricty company, which has been plagued by frequent system failures since March this year, recently promised an end to outages by the end of August.
The power cuts have been occurring with greater frequency since the company started a maintenance programme for some of its main generating units. The company explained that maintenance of major generating units caused a shortfall in capacity so there was not enough power to supply all customers.
Early last month Jamaica Manufacturers Association (JMA) president Clarence Clarke said that power cuts were coming so frequently that manufacturers could not assess the losses they were suffering until the power cuts end. He said that manufacturers were becoming increasingly concerned about the outages, as they were disrupting the sector, causing a loss to production and of products.
The disruption, he said, had forced some plants to close for hours and send home workers.
