(Trinidad Express) Tobago House of Assembly Chief Secretary Farley Augustine has lamented the delay in the containment of the fuel spill in Tobago, and was highly critical of the response of the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard.
Augustine, who spoke during the 27th sitting of the Assembly Legislative on Thursday, called out the response time of the T&T Coast Guard.
“I will recommend that the Department of Border Security and Control be established within the Ministry of National Security; the core lead agencies for this department will be the Coast Guard, the Air Guard, Customs, Immigration and the adjacent tiers of port and airport security, and international support and collaboration.
“With regards to Tobago and containment, there is no secret that we can’t even get help for a fisherman in danger out in the open seas. We can’t even get that, because there’s never a boat available in Tobago—you always have to wait.
“And I heard some people in the public space—especially some people whose political relevance died on December 6, 2021—trying to say: look, Tobago did not move fast enough with the oil spill crisis.
“But imagine, madam presiding officer, the report of the oil spill on Wednesday, February 7 at 7.20 a.m…(Do) you know when we were able to get the first Coast Guard vessel to Tobago? Between Thursday night and Friday morning in the middle of the night,” Augustine said.
Augustine lamented that this was not the first time Coast Guard vessels have been delayed.
“And we heard the excuses, and I’m not blaming the Coast Guard men and women themselves. We really got the excuses—the vessel break down, we couldn’t leave right away…
“In my electoral district, we have had fishermen endangered at sea, engine breakdown, drifting, going away, and we call Coast Guard and we have zero response, and then we have to scramble in the village, taking up the phone, calling—You have gas? You have gas?” Augustine said.
He said there are concerns with Tobago’s capacity to initially deal with the oil spill.
“I want Tobagonians to consider, for a moment, an island’s capacity to treat with certain levels of insecurity. That capacity is quite low. And it became evident with the oil spill. Yes, this is an oil and gas-producing country; but (after) a major oil spill in Tobago, almost every specialised (piece of) equipment, including booms, had to be shipped from Trinidad to Tobago,” Augustine said.
Augustine said a catastrophe was averted at the Scarborough port “because Woodside had some storage of booms across at Almandoz.
“Those booms were owned by Kaizen, and Woodside asked Kaizen to keep those booms there in Tobago. If those booms weren’t already on the island, then we would have had to shut down the operations of the port. That (would have) meant the fast ferry, the cargo boat, the cruise ships—none of them would have been able to set sail.”
