With the life of its in­dus­try-plus on the line, the To­ba­go Ho­tel and Tourism As­so­ci­a­tion has got­ten to the bot­tom line of in­tol­er­ance with the seabridge, and it not meet­ing the needs of es­pe­cial­ly peo­ple liv­ing in To­ba­go and those want­i­ng to trav­el be­tween the two parts of the na­tion.

The fact is that the re­sult­ing dis­rup­tion on yet an­oth­er oc­ca­sion is af­fect­ing in­di­vid­u­als, busi­ness and oth­er na­tion­al mat­ters of sig­nif­i­cance by a non-func­tion­ing of one of the fer­ries as­signed to ser­vice the sea route be­tween the is­lands.

Chron­ic in­sta­bil­i­ty in in­ter-is­land trans­port, sea and air, has re­peat­ed­ly crip­pled To­ba­go’s tourism-dri­ven econ­o­my, un­der­mined in­vestor con­fi­dence, and erod­ed the qual­i­ty of life for res­i­dents, im­pact­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly on the tourism and busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty of the is­land.

“Stu­dents, pa­tients, vis­i­tors are rou­tine­ly bur­dened by the anx­i­ety of not know­ing when they can trav­el, re­turn home, at­tend med­ical ap­point­ments, or plan busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ty with con­fi­dence,” states the TH­TA, re­lat­ing to the present sit­u­a­tion of the MV Blue Wave Har­mo­ny, on­ly re­cent­ly leased for the seabridge, ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a form of dam­age.

Per­haps res­i­dents of Trinidad, who do not de­pend as heav­i­ly on sea and air trans­port be­tween Trinidad and To­ba­go, can­not un­der­stand ful­ly the vi­tal im­por­tance of the need for an ef­fi­cient, re­li­able, safe and read­i­ly avail­able sea and air trans­port sys­tem, as much as those who live on the “sis­ter isle.”

For res­i­dents of To­ba­go, a trans­port ser­vice as de­scribed above can be the dif­fer­ence be­tween life and death, a pre­dictable pas­sage to and fro, and a con­tin­u­ous sup­ply of many ne­ces­si­ties of mod­ern life. And that is so be­cause of the re­liance on trans­port for im­me­di­ate, mid­dle and long-term eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment.

This ed­i­to­r­i­al is not about whether the Blue Wave Har­mo­ny is fit to ser­vice the need, who or what was re­spon­si­ble for the ac­ci­dent in which the ves­sel was in­volved, and whether or not suf­fi­cient ex­pert at­ten­tion was in­vest­ed in ac­quir­ing the right ves­sel to serve the pur­posed need it was ac­quired for. Why? To pur­sue such a line of in­quiry at the dis­cus­sion lev­el will meet all the road­blocks, ex­cus­es, the ex­change of re­spon­si­bil­i­ty be­tween and amongst gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials, those who leased the ves­sel and in­evitably, the po­lit­i­cal as­sign­ment of blame.

Per­haps what needs to be con­veyed to all in­volved and re­spon­si­ble is the re­al­i­ty of the ab­solute need for a qual­i­ty and re­li­able trans­port ser­vice for Trinidad and To­ba­go, in the same man­ner and lev­el of im­por­tance as move­ment along the east-west cor­ri­dor and be­tween the north and south of Trinidad.

Such an as­ser­tion may seem strange be­cause it is so ob­vi­ous. There are in­stances, though, when the re­al­i­ty does not shine as bright­ly as ex­pect­ed.

Here is a sug­ges­tion to all in­volved: have de­vel­oped a mass in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion aware­ness pro­gramme on the ab­solute need for de­pend­able, ef­fec­tive and well-man­aged trav­el be­tween To­ba­go and Trinidad and the re­verse. At the end of such a pro­gramme amongst all in­volved, the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment, the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly, the Op­po­si­tion in the Par­lia­ment, busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, in­clu­sive of the tourism in­dus­try, and cit­i­zens need­ing to go back and forth, must be­come the guid­ing force which will dri­ve the so­lu­tions re­quired.