BO­BIE-LEE DIXON (bo­bie-lee.dixon@guardian.co.tt)

Di­rec­tors at Nanan’s Ca­roni Bird Sanc­tu­ary Tours, are ad­vo­cat­ing for the pro­tec­tion and con­ser­va­tion of the en­vi­ron­ment—par­tic­u­lar­ly the Ca­roni Swamp and the Bird Sanc­tu­ary—as they call on the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go to as­sess the FSO Nabari­ma's threat with haste.

They al­so warn that many liveli­hoods, and the econ­o­my of T&T would be threat­ened as well, if ac­tion is not tak­en soon. They point to past his­to­ry, which has proven how dev­as­tat­ing an oil spill could be to the nat­ur­al habi­tat of all ma­rine macro and mi­croor­gan­isms as well as the birds that feed and set­tle on the sea as well as the ef­fect it takes on wa­ter qual­i­ty and the dam­age to coastal veg­e­ta­tion

Their call comes in the wake of sev­er­al ap­peals made by var­i­ous groups in­clud­ing the Fish­er­men and Friends of the Sea (FFOS), led by Gary Aboud, who made the ear­li­est plea to the Gov­ern­ment to in­ter­vene and as­sess the state of the ves­sel, said to be in a poor con­di­tion and car­ry­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 1.3 mil­lion bar­rel’s worth of crude oil.

They say if a spillage hap­pened, it would be even more dev­as­tat­ing than that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez' spill, one of the most en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly dis­as­trous spills in his­to­ry to date.

FFOS urges Gov­ern­ment get proac­tive be­fore dis­as­ter strikes

Mean­while, FFOS is urg­ing that the Gov­ern­ment team tasked with as­sess­ing the full ex­tent of the Nabari­ma’s threat, must con­duct a com­pre­hen­sive as­sess­ment.

“It is crit­i­cal that our Gov­ern­ment’s mis­sion to­mor­row be trans­par­ent with pho­to and video ev­i­dence to the pop­u­la­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go,” FFOS states in a re­lease is­sued to­day.

“FFOS urges the In­sti­tute of Ma­rine Af­fairs, who will be on this ex­cur­sion to per­form a fin­ger­print analy­sis on the oil, so that in the event of a spill, we would know whether the oil came from the FSO Nabari­ma,” the group says.

It adds: “We al­so urge our Min­is­ter of For­eign Af­fairs to con­sid­er the place­ment of some­one with ex­per­tise in ship main­te­nance and re­pair on­to this team of ex­perts to en­sure that a prop­er un­der­stand­ing of the ves­sel’s state is ob­tained and pos­si­ble per­ma­nent so­lu­tions are ad­vised.”

Over the past two months, the en­vi­ron­men­tal lob­by as ap­pealed to the Row­ley Ad­min­is­tra­tion to move swift­ly on the Nabari­ma sit­u­a­tion, warn­ing that a spill could “po­ten­tial­ly cause a ma­jor en­vi­ron­men­tal geno­cide in our Gulf of Paria which will de­stroy our Caribbean tourism prod­uct”. 

It al­so has re­peat­ed­ly called for the fol­low­ing:

●  The as­sem­bly of an in­de­pen­dent team of ex­perts to ver­i­fy and make pub­lic the ves­sel’s sta­tus, to pro­pose a method of safe­ly re­mov­ing the 1.3 mil­lion bar­rels of oil stored with­in and to ad­vise of per­ma­nent re­pairs which are im­me­di­ate­ly re­quired.

●  A uni­fied Latin Amer­i­ca and CARI­COM ef­fort to de­vel­op and im­ple­ment a Re­gion­al Oil Spill Con­tin­gency Plan that will ad­dress sit­u­a­tions like this, which are in­evitable due to the in­crease in oil ex­plo­ration and ex­trac­tion in the Re­gion such as Guyana, Bar­ba­dos and Ba­hamas.