Both Paria Fuel and LMCS failed in their duty of care to the four divers who lost their lives in the Paria Fuel diving tragedy, counsel to the Commission of Enquiry set up to investigate the deadly February 25, 2022 accident, said yesterday.
Senior counsel Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj was delivering his closing statement to the CoE yesterday when he made the comment. He also said both companies were jointly responsible for rescuing the divers.
Maharaj said the companies had a legal duty to safeguard human lives.
“From my submissions this morning, I have shown that there was a duty of care to be exercised by Paria with regard to the inherently dangerous work, quite apart from the permit to work. I have shown in my statement this morning that both Paria and LMCS ought to have detected the Delta P hazard from all the documents before the work was done, that caused no emergency response plan with the Delta P hazard being approved, so Paria shares that responsibility, that failure was a joint failure,” Maharaj said.
Maharaj said Paria did not have a “genuine review” of the documents provided by LMCS before the works started and according to the evidence submitted by the company, it relied on LMCS to identify the safety risks of the job.
“LMCS got it totally wrong and since Paria did not have the expertise, it rubber-stamped,” Maharaj said.
He said from evidence submitted in the Occupational Health and Safety Authority’s (OSHA’s) report, done by InCorrTech, the removal of oil from sealine 36 caused the Delta P hazard to form.
That hazard remained inactive until the inflatable plug was removed on February 25, sucking the five divers and their equipment into the pipeline. Both LMCS and Paria did not consider this, Maharaj said.
The commission’s chairman, Jerome Lynch, KC, interjected, saying, “The mere fact that this seemingly took days, days of pumping, must have told them surely that they were taking out more than the 30-foot ullage they required on either side. As I have indicated before, you could do it with a bucket. It does seem somewhat extraordinary that nobody at LMCS was saying ‘well hang on, how much are we actually taking out?’ if this is taking day upon day upon day?” Lynch asked.
Maharaj said if only enough of the line’s content had been sucked out to create the 35-feet ullage LMCS wanted before starting the work, the Delta P would not have occurred.
Maharaj said this highlighted the importance of having professional engineers monitoring, assessing and overseeing inherently dangerous jobs such as the repair of subsea lines.
“Paria and LMCS were therefore jointly responsible for the accident and were therefore jointly responsible to make efforts to rescue the divers,” Maharaj said.