Coast Guard Lieutenant Edric Hargreaves said he never stopped anyone from attempting to rescue the four LMCS divers who were trapped in a pipeline on February 25.
Hargreaves was giving evidence yesterday before the Commission of Enquiry (CoE) into the accident in which the four divers were killed.
In the days following the accident, multiple allegations were made that Coast Guard officers had stopped volunteer rescue divers from going into the pipeline to rescue the men.
The bodies of the four men, Yusuf Henry, Rishi Nagassar, Fyzal Kurban and Kazim Ali Junior, were recovered from the pipeline days after the accident.
One diver, Christopher Boodram, managed to climb to the top of the pipeline where he was rescued on the day of the incident. Boodram said he told anyone who would listen to him the other divers were still alive when he was rescued from the pipeline.
Yesterday, counsel for the CoE Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj asked Hargreaves directly whether he prevented those who were trying to rescue the men from doing so.
“No sir, I don’t have the requisite qualifications to stop such a rescue,” Hargreaves said.
Maharaj also asked him if Paria gave him any instructions to stop anyone from going into the pipeline.
Hargreaves said that did not happen.
“The only person I spoke to was Ms (Catherine) Balkissoon that night, I did not speak to anybody else that night because she was the person I would have assumed was the incident commander on that night,” he said.
Hargreaves said the decision to prevent rescue came from Paria officials, not from the Coast Guard.
He said the Coast Guard could not attempt a rescue as their divers were not trained to do confined space diving and did not have the necessary equipment for such a rescue.
He explained that when he told Paria a rescue was too risky, he was speaking only about the risks if the Coast Guard had to conduct a rescue.
“If they made an opinion and say, hey if the Coast Guard not doing it then nobody should do it, then that is on their part, sir, not on the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard or the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force,” Hargreaves said.
Maharaj asked Hargreaves how he could assess diving in a pipeline as unsafe when he did not have any experience or training to do so.
“Again sir, the assessment was for my team of the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard diving department. It was not for anybody else. If someone else came and said, hey, we want to make an attempt, we would have been there to assist,” he said.
He said he never told Paria not to allow divers who were qualified to do the rescue.
“They never indicated to me that they had persons qualified,” Hargreaves said.
