Resh­ma Ra­goonath

I stood spell­bound in the pour­ing rain on Fri­day, too lost in the dev­as­ta­tion fac­ing me at the Aripero Man­grove to no­tice my feet were sink­ing in­to a thick pool of oil mixed with sand and mud.

That sink­ing feel­ing is pret­ty much what I be­lieve most of the res­i­dents along the south­west­ern penin­su­la feel as they watch help­less­ly as lay­ers of oil colour the shores of the once pris­tine Cof­fee, Point Sable and Car­rat Shed beach­es in La Brea.

Those ar­eas, once teem­ing with fish, crabs, oys­ters and shrimps, have now turned in­to a black­ened ceme­tery for the wildlife un­able to es­cape the black ooze blan­ket­ing the shore. The roots of the beau­ti­ful Aripero man­grove are now paint­ed with oil.

For two weeks, now en­ter­ing a third, I have been cov­er­ing the oil spill in La Brea which is now rav­aging the pro­tect­ed man­grove.

As I in­ter­viewed fish­er­folk from Granville to Ota­heite, their faces etched with anx­i­ety, it was ob­vi­ous the oil spill is a clear and present dan­ger to their liveli­hood.

On Fri­day, Ota­heite fish­er­men took the me­dia on a boat tour of the Aripero man­grove that has been sul­lied by the car­pet of oil creep­ing up the shore­line from Car­rat Shed beach.

While Petrotrin says it has the oil spill un­der con­trol, the mag­ni­tude of the dev­as­ta­tion left in its path can­not be quan­ti­fied. The beach may be cleaned and the fish­er­folk may be com­pen­sat­ed but the wildlife that has been lost and the eco­log­i­cal dam­age can­not be un­done.

When we made our way to the man­grove, which is on­ly ac­ces­si­ble by boat, it was abun­dant­ly clear the oil spill was wreak­ing hav­oc on the area that is home to one of the na­tion­al birds, the scar­let ibis.

Fish­er­men said since the De­cem­ber 17 spill, the birds have mi­grat­ed and are no longer seen com­ing to the man­grove on evenings to roost.

As a jour­nal­ist, sub­jec­tiv­i­ty and emo­tions have no place when cov­er­ing the vary­ing de­grees of the hu­man con­di­tion. How­ev­er, my heart melt­ed on Fri­day as I watched an el­der­ly man, Prem­nath Ba­boolal, a crab­catch­er, break down in tears as he ex­pressed fear that the man­grove would not re­cov­er and he would not be able to feed his fam­i­ly.

Sim­ply put, for these peo­ple, Petrotrin is not work­ing fast enough.