Yvonne Webb

En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty CEO Dr Joth Singh has ruled out poi­son­ing in the death of hun­dreds of fish found in a sec­tion of the La Pas­to­ra Riv­er, San­ta Cruz, on Fri­day.Singh said EMA's in­ves­ti­ga­tion showed the fish kill was caused by the silt in the wa­ter, be­cause of the con­struc­tion of a wall near the site. He said EMA in­ves­ti­ga­tors who went to the site found ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50 dif­fer­ent species of dead fish.

"Based on our in­ves­ti­ga­tion, we con­nect­ed it to a de­vel­op­ment oc­cur­ring in the La Pas­to­ra area, by a con­trac­tor act­ing on be­half of the Drainage Di­vi­sion of the Min­istry of Works," he said.He ex­plained that the con­trac­tor was en­gaged in prepara­to­ry work to strength­en the riv­er wall. He said the ac­tiv­i­ty cre­at­ed a high tur­bid­i­ty lev­el (of silt) in the wa­ter.

"We recog­nise a fair amount of silt was be­ing gen­er­at­ed by the op­er­a­tion (con­struc­tion) it­self that led to high tur­bid­i­ty lev­els in the wa­ter in the vicin­i­ty of the con­struc­tion. We ex­pect the fish kill was as­so­ci­at­ed with the high lev­els of tur­bid­i­ty in the wa­ter...There was no episode of poi­son­ing."What the con­trac­tor should have done was to block off the area to pre­vent any silt from en­ter­ing the wa­ter col­umn."

He said he did not think there would be any work stop­page, as a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the work has al­ready been com­plet­ed.How­ev­er, the in­ves­ti­ga­tors have been li­ais­ing with the con­trac­tor to en­sure that he takes pre­cau­tion­ary mea­sures to pre­vent a re­oc­cur­rence al­though a sig­nif­i­cant part of the work has al­ready been done.

The EMA was alert­ed to the sit­u­a­tion on Fri­day by one of the di­rec­tors of the Pa­pa Bois Con­ser­va­tion Marc de Ver­teuil. The mat­ter was al­so re­port­ed to the In­sti­tute of Ma­rine Af­fairs.