Sascha Wil­son

Two men are feared dead and three oth­ers are hos­pi­talised af­ter a small boat car­ry­ing 13 peo­ple cap­sized at the Navet Reser­voir yes­ter­day.Up to late yes­ter­day evening Coast Guard dri­vers were still comb­ing the wa­ter at the Tabaquite reser­voir for the two men.Po­lice said the men were iden­ti­fied as Bas­deo Ram­lal, a Tabaquite res­i­dent, and An­tho­ny War­rick, an em­ploy­ee with Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA).

War­rick worked at the reser­voir and both he and his wife were in the boat, po­lice said. Sun­day Guardian was told that the boat be­gan tak­ing in wa­ter and then over­turned. The reser­voir has a depth of 44 feet and stor­age ca­pac­i­ty of 4.2 bil­lion gal­lons.A re­lease sent by WASA's Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions man­ag­er, Ellen Lewis, stat­ed that ini­tial re­ports sug­gest­ed that 13 peo­ple, two of whom were WASA em­ploy­ees, were on the boat around 11 am when it over­turned.

Lewis said WASA would be pro­vid­ing coun­selling and oth­er forms of sup­port to the rel­a­tives of those in­volved and they will be kept abreast of the sit­u­a­tion.The three peo­ple who are ward­ed at the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal are said to be in sta­ble con­di­tion.The re­lease stat­ed that the boat in the ex­pe­di­tion was a sin­gle-en­gine ves­sel usu­al­ly used by au­tho­rised per­son­nel to con­duct depth sam­ples and for rou­tine main­te­nance of the dam.

The Navet Dam is one of the ma­jor reser­voirs sup­ply­ing potable wa­ter in T&T.