CONSPIRACY theories that last Friday night’s all-island power outage was due to the arrival of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Nimitz to Jamaica and a fire at the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) headquarters were shut down by Minister of Science, Energy, Telecommunications, and Transport Daryl Vaz, who said the claims were ludicrous and fake news.

Addressing a press conference with representatives of Jamaica Public Service (JPS), on Saturday, to provide an update on the progress to restore power to the island, Vaz assured citizens that the outage was due to inclement weather which resulted in a system failure.

“I want to make it very clear at this point that it was a system failure of the JPS, and to make sure that I state clearly that all of the conspiracy theories that have been making the [rounds] are fake news. I will not even repeat some of them because they are so ludicrous. This was a simple, or should I say, a straightforward system breakdown within the JPS apparatus,” insisted Vaz.