One Kingston Neighbourhood Never Lost Power During Beryl. The Difference Was Underground

• Hope Pastures kept power while overhead lines elsewhere failed
• The difference was underground electrical circuits
• A civil engineer calls outdated overhead methods a future liability
• He wants empathy, speed and equity built into the recovery response

Hope Pastures’ experience during Hurricane Beryl showed the difference starkly, according to civil engineer and CEAC Solutions managing director Dr Christopher Burgess: overhead poles failed across the island, while the Kingston neighbourhood’s underground electrical circuits stayed online throughout the storm. In a more intense hurricane climate, he argued, outdated overhead methods will continue to fail in exactly the way they did that time.

Burgess’s broader case is that Jamaica’s road to recovery from successive storms requires a genuinely hybrid approach, informed, pragmatic and economically resilient, rather than simply rebuilding what existed before each time a hurricane knocks it down. He framed the response government owes residents in three specific, distinct terms: empathy in securing water supplies quickly, speed in actually communicating the building code so people rebuild correctly the first time, and equity in how housing relief actually gets distributed, alongside a more literal engineering fix, planting utility poles deeper to better withstand wind loads where full undergrounding isn’t feasible.

The storms of the future are already forming, Burgess warned, and will punish the society that does not learn and evolve, framing underground utility infrastructure not as a Hope Pastures-specific amenity but as a genuine template other Jamaican communities should be moving toward, particularly given how directly the neighbourhood’s outcome contrasted with areas that lost power for days or weeks after the same storm.

The practical barrier to widespread undergrounding is cost and disruption rather than any dispute about whether it works, JPS and similar utilities elsewhere have long noted undergrounding runs several times more expensive per mile than overhead lines to install, even though it largely eliminates wind-related outages once in place. Hope Pastures’ outcome during Beryl is exactly the kind of real-world evidence that case for undergrounding usually has to argue from hypothetically, a single neighbourhood that simply kept the lights on while its neighbours did not.

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