Zi­co Co­zi­er

Tourism Min­is­ter Chan­dresh Shar­ma took off his shoes, rolled up his dress pants and splashed in­to the shal­low wa­ters of Las Cuevas Bay on Wednes­day to help life­guards car­ry a new mark­er buoy out to sea.The Min­istry of Tourism has com­mis­sioned mark­er buoys for the North Coast for the first time ever. Be­tween Tues­day and Wednes­day, three were in­stalled at Mara­cas, two at Tyri­co and three at Las Cuevas. This ini­tia­tive was for­mal­ly launched at Las Cuevas Bay on Wednes­day.

The ini­tia­tive aims at im­prov­ing wa­ter safe­ty for beach­go­ers. The buoys will help dis­tin­guish be­tween ar­eas des­ig­nat­ed for sea bathing and ar­eas des­ig­nat­ed for sea ves­sels which will ad­dress pos­si­ble in­ci­dents in the wa­ter in­volv­ing plea­sure craft, fish­ing ves­sels and sea bathers.

Shar­ma felt con­fi­dent that the project would be suc­cess­ful, say­ing his min­istry had col­lab­o­rat­ed in plan­ning the project with the Mar­itime Ser­vices Di­vi­sion, the Fish­eries Di­vi­sion, the Coast Guard, the Tourism De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny, the San Juan/Laven­tille Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion and vil­lagers from the re­spec­tive com­mu­ni­ties.Sev­en oth­er buoys will be placed at oth­er beach­es in Ma­yaro, Los Iros, Saly­bia and Quinam.

De­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress be­fore head­ing in­to the wa­ter, Shar­ma boast­ed that T&T has one of the best safe­ty records in the world on the beach­es.He al­so con­firmed that there were no re­port­ed in­ci­dents for the en­tire pe­ri­od of the wind surge which the Met Of­fice said start­ed last Sat­ur­day morn­ing.The wind surge has been the cause of rough seas and waves some­times in ex­cess of ten feet along the north and east coasts.

The Met Of­fice has warned peo­ple to re­main alert as strong winds con­tin­ue to ag­i­tate sur­faces of the At­lantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea.Shar­ma al­so re­it­er­at­ed the min­istry's com­mit­ment to cre­ate a more fam­i­ly-ori­ent­ed en­vi­ron­ment on beach­es."Some­times you go on a beach and there are per­sons com­ing with huge DJ trucks and park­ing it up and dis­turb­ing oth­ers. We will be at­tend­ing to that," he said.

"We want to make sure when the fam­i­ly comes to the beach, they are in a fam­i­ly en­vi­ron­ment, that safe­ty and con­cerns of a sim­i­lar kind are treat­ed with."