Kali­fa Clyne

There needs to be new leg­is­la­tion to deal with the man­age­ment of na­tion­al emer­gen­cies and dis­as­ters.This was one of the rec­om­men­da­tions in a re­port pre­sent­ed by Pres­i­dent An­tho­ny Car­mona at a meet­ing with mem­bers of the new­ly ap­point­ed Na­tion­al En­vi­ron­men­tal As­sess­ment Task Force at the Of­fice of the Pres­i­dent, St Ann's.

The re­port was the re­sult of con­sul­ta­tions held by a mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary pan­el that Car­mona con­vened in Jan­u­ary to pro­vide in­sight in­to the caus­es, na­ture, ex­tent and im­pact of the oil spills which took place in the south-west­ern penin­su­la in De­cem­ber.Eleven oil spills re­sult­ed in ap­prox­i­mate­ly 7,000 bar­rels of oil be­ing leaked in­to the sea off south Trinidad. The oil washed up on beach­es and af­fect­ed ma­rine and hu­man life.

The pan­el of 25 ex­perts from the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) and the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T (UTT) was chaired by UTT Provost Fazal Ali and Dean of the Fac­ul­ty of En­gi­neer­ing at UWI St Au­gus­tine, Prof Bri­an Copeland.Yes­ter­day the re­port was hand­ed over to the task force, less than an hour af­ter the ten mem­bers re­ceived their ap­point­ment let­ters from En­vi­ron­ment Min­is­ter Gan­ga Singh at Tow­er D, Wa­ter­front Cen­tre, Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain.

Three ad­di­tion­al po­si­tions of the task force need to be filled by two in­ter­na­tion­al ex­perts and one lo­cal ex­pert.Singh said he ex­pect­ed these po­si­tions to be filled with­in two weeks.Car­mona, who said things had gone "woe­ful­ly wrong" in De­cem­ber when the oil spills oc­curred, said in­for­ma­tion reach­ing the pub­lic had not been co­he­sive and was of­ten con­flict­ing.

RE­PORT REC­OM­MEN­DA­TIONS

�2 Need for poli­cies, mea­sures, mech­a­nisms and sys­tems to de­tect, coun­ter­act and treat with dis­as­ters.

�2 Sys­tems should be put in place to en­sure the im­me­di­ate and fu­ture well-be­ing of those af­fect­ed by na­tion­al emer­gen­cies and dis­as­ters and so­ci­ety as a whole.

�2 Mod­ernised leg­is­la­tion.

�2 Ef­fec­tive co-or­di­na­tion of agen­cies re­spon­si­ble for the man­age­ment of oil spills was al­so high­light­ed.

ema re­sponse

EMA re­sponse

Chair­man of the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) Al­lan Bachan, whose agency played a key role in mon­i­tor­ing the oil spills, ac­cept­ed the re­port on be­half of the task force.Bachan was al­so ap­point­ed as chair­man of the new task force.He said his role at the EMA would not con­flict with his ap­point­ment as chair­man of the task force.One of the 17 di­rec­tives giv­en to the group is to eval­u­ate the re­sponse of all agen­cies, in­clud­ing the EMA.

Asked whether or not the task force would be car­ry­ing out a sim­i­lar func­tion to the EMA, Singh said this was not the case."The EMA is a reg­u­la­to­ry body. The task force will make rec­om­men­da­tions, and if it is for leg­is­la­tion, then that is some­thing we will do." Singh said.