Gail Alexan­der ??

Petrotrin yes­ter­day sent up aer­i­al sur­veil­lance air­craft to in­ves­ti­gate in­for­ma­tion that 17,000 pounds of mul­let had been dumped off the coast near La Brea, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine said.The alert to Petrotrin's po­lice came in yes­ter­day from sources both in Ota­heite and Clax­ton Bay, the com­pa­ny al­so con­firmed.But aer­i­al sur­veil­lance be­tween Ota­heite and Ica­cos–up to ten miles off the shore­line–did not de­tect any mass of dead fish, Petrotrin con­firmed to the T&T Guardian last night.

The in­for­ma­tion came to the com­pa­ny on the eve of to­day's protest march in the La Brea area by fish­er­men and oth­er groups who are still clam­our­ing over sev­er­al is­sues, in­clud­ing the De­cem­ber 2013 oil spill. Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) MP Fitzger­ald Jef­frey (La Brea) said he's par­tic­i­pat­ing in the march.

Ahead of that, Ram­nar­ine said yes­ter­day that he had re­ceived a re­port from Petrotrin that the com­pa­ny was in­ves­ti­gat­ing in­tel­li­gence re­ceived that peo­ple in the fish­ing in­dus­try had dumped 17,000 pounds of mul­let near La Brea. If that was so, he said, the fish would wash up on the beach­es.

Petrotrin is al­ready cop­ing with the fall­out from the wash­ing-up of dead fish on Cof­fee Beach, La Brea, in March. How­ev­er, re­ports done by both the In­sti­tute of Ma­rine Af­fairs and En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Agency (EMA) have shown that the fish were healthy and were not poi­soned by tox­ins or chem­i­cals used by Petrotrin in the De­cem­ber oil spill clean-up ex­er­cise.

Both agen­cies have, how­ev­er, de­tect­ed ex­ter­nal marks on the fish and have not­ed pos­si­ble dump­ing as the rea­son for the wash­ing-up of the fish, the T&T Guardian re­port­ed ex­clu­sive­ly yes­ter­day.

Ram­nar­ine said the fish which had been wash­ing up on the beach­es were mul­let and as he un­der­stood it, there was no mar­ket for mul­let lo­cal­ly. He said there is a mar­ket for it in Venezuela.

He said the min­istry had sent 14 sam­ples of the fish to a US lab which test­ed them for the Corex­it chem­i­cal used in the oil spill clean-up and the lab found no de­tectable lev­el of the ac­tive in­gre­di­ent in Corex­it. The sam­ples were al­so test­ed for poly­cyclic aro­mat­ic hy­dro­car­bons and no po­ten­tial risk was found. He said Corex­it was on­ly used in Pointe-a-Pierre and 31 drums were used.Five months af­ter the oil spill, he said the chem­i­cal would have been tremen­dous­ly di­lut­ed by Gulf of Paria wa­ters by now.

Petrotrin stat­ed last night that it is con­tin­u­ing to close­ly mon­i­tor the sit­u­a­tion fol­low­ing re­ports of fish dump­ing.