Public Works Minister Juan Edghill yesterday announced the suspension of the search for three Noble House Seafoods fishermen who went missing off the East Coast on February 19.
He made the announcement at a meeting with family members. He told them that there had been no substantial leads from the searches.
Edghill could not be reached by Stabroek News for comment but a report from the Department of Public Information (DPI) reported him as saying “at this point, I do not know what else I can do in terms of search. It is a tough decision but we would have to suspend the search and go into a new phase of being on the alert while we continue to traverse the areas praying that we find something.”
“We left speechless when the minister said that. We couldn’t a say nothing else. We suspected it was coming…” Claudine Welch told Stabroek News yesterday. Welch is the daughter of 78-year-old Ronald Burton, one of the missing men.
The others missing are Captain of the vessel, Harold Anthony Damon, 45, and Winston Sam, 46, of McDoom, East Bank Demerara (EBD).
According to Welch, the Minister said that while they will not have a search crew out daily, vessels working in the area have been told to be on the lookout.
This newspaper learnt that apart from the search being suspended, the computer to read the sonar scans picked up by the Maritime Administration Department’s (MARAD) vessel is not functioning. Stabroek News was told that the computer has to be replaced as it was damaged when one of the windows on the vessel broke. This occurred during one of the searches.
“MARAD has assured me, that the sonar equipment which scans the river bed, was damaged during the search. As soon as we could get the parts, we will do a scanning of the sea bed again once we get that fixed,” Edghill said in the DPI report.
The Public Works Minister said that the search crew spent 936 hours at sea and scanned over 1,800 nautical miles for the men and the vessel.
“Some people felt that I would have suspended the search after a couple of days and you are not seeing anything floating but I know that there are human beings with real emotions that are looking for answers and I would also want as a person in the discharge of my responsibility as the Minister responsible for the sector, to ensure that everything that was humanly possible, every resource that is available to the state and to the private sector was utilised to ensure that we get answers,” the minister said.
He told the families that he is saddened by the fact that they have to suspend the search. However, he said that his office remains open to the families for further engagement.
“If you have any questions, concerns or any information that could help us at the end of reading that report, my office remains open and available to you for engagement,” he said.
Meanwhile, the presentation of the report from the Board of Inquiry to the Minister yesterday was postponed. The Board of Inquiry was set up to investigate what occurred and whether there was a breakdown in communication.
The families have said that the stories being told by the lone survivor Vincent Dazell and the men who rescued him are inconsistent.
“We don’t hear nothing from anyone. Noble House don’t contact me as the wife of the captain or no other family member and if we do find out for we self they say they don’t have no update… I remember I ask at one of the meeting if it would be impossible to find the boat, such a big vessel and they said no,” Damon’s wife Tonszadel Beckles-Damon said.
“We still believe they are alive because it is over a month and the bodies ain’t float up nowhere and they cannot locate the boat. We holding on that they are still alive because we cannot understand how nothing from this boat ain’t showing up,” the wife lamented.
Dazell last week told Stabroek News that when he was rescued he was clinging to the life raft from the vessel.
“I don’t know what happened to them I honestly don’t. When the boat was going down [Ronald] Burton and [Winston] Sam were on one side of the boat and I was on the other side… Nobody was standing close to me…Anthony had run back inside the boat to get his phone but I never see him back because the boat deh start sinking from the back and then it toppled,” he related.
“I momentarily went down and when I come up back I see the baskets and fishing tub floating around me. I was still holding on to the life raft but when I look I didn’t see nobody around me nor I didn’t see the boat… I float for like 45 minutes before they come and rescue me,” he recounted.
According to Dazell, when he was rescued by the fishermen on a small boat they had to lift him out of the water because “I had no strength to pull myself up. I deh catching cramps.” The survivor explained that even when he was in the boat he lost consciousness for some time.
Edghill had previously expressed concern over the fact that the boat captain was operating without being properly licensed. On this note, the minister stated that this should not have been the case and this now raises many questions on the practices at sea and more so at Noble House Seafoods.
Questions have also been raised about whether Noble House Seafoods acted promptly to mobilise help for the boat when it was advised that it was in distress.
