To­day, one year af­ter the Paria Fu­el div­ing tragedy, this na­tion still awaits an­swers. The pas­sage of time has not brought clar­i­ty or clo­sure and the trag­ic mile­stone be­ing ob­served to­day with prayers and som­bre re­flec­tion, is over­shad­owed by the many unan­swered ques­tions and a lack of ac­count­abil­i­ty.

In­deed, there is still a lot that has not been re­vealed about the se­quence of events on that Fri­day af­ter­noon when five divers em­ployed with LM­CS Lim­it­ed, Christo­pher Boodram, Fyzal Kur­ban, Kaz­im Ali Jr, Yusuf Hen­ry and Rishi Na­gas­sar, got trapped in an un­der­sea pipeline off Pointe-a-Pierre.

They were an ex­pe­ri­enced team, qual­i­fied to un­der­take the main­te­nance work that was be­ing done. In ad­di­tion, LM­CS Lim­it­ed, the ser­vice com­pa­ny con­tract­ed by Paria, had a track record of more than 30 years in a wide range of ma­rine sup­port op­er­a­tions.

But things went hor­ri­bly wrong. A Delta P sit­u­a­tion de­vel­oped, caus­ing the divers to be sucked deep in­to the 30-inch pipeline lo­cat­ed at Berth 6 at the Paria fa­cil­i­ty.

On­ly Christo­pher Boodram sur­vived and he was res­cued with­in hours. The oth­er divers re­mained trapped in the pipeline for more than three days.

For Mr Boodram, the mul­ti­ple in­juries he suf­fered re­quired treat­ment at hos­pi­tal but have been much eas­i­er to heal than the men­tal and emo­tion­al tor­ment he suf­fered. Mr Boodram is now a bro­ken man, scarred for life by that trau­mat­ic ex­pe­ri­ence and plagued by fre­quent night­mares, flash­backs and sur­vivor’s guilt

The fam­i­lies of the oth­er divers en­dured a long and painful wait at the com­pound, made worse by the pauci­ty of in­for­ma­tion from Paria of­fi­cials, be­fore their worst fears were con­firmed with the re­trieval of four bod­ies from the pipeline be­tween Feb­ru­ary 28 and March 2.

Dur­ing those dif­fi­cult days, as the trag­ic di­men­sions of the ac­ci­dent un­fold­ed, the en­tire coun­try was gripped by cir­cum­stances in which those four men died.

Even the pub­lic hear­ings of the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry (CoE), chaired by Jerome Lynch KC, have so far not pro­vid­ed an­swers to the many cru­cial ques­tions aris­ing out of that in­ci­dent. That is why there is now an anx­ious wait for April 30 and the re­lease of the re­port of that CoE.

What the coun­try and those griev­ing fam­i­lies need is not on­ly an ex­pla­na­tion as to why that div­ing ac­ci­dent hap­pened, but a full ven­ti­la­tion of the rea­sons why it was de­cid­ed not to res­cue the men and in­stead re­cov­er their bod­ies.

Ques­tions per­sist about whether ad­e­quate safe­ty pre­cau­tions were tak­en to pre­vent the in­ci­dent. Pre­lim­i­nary find­ings by the Oc­cu­pa­tion­al Health and Safe­ty Au­thor­i­ty (OS­HA) sug­gest nei­ther LM­CS nor Paria gave suf­fi­cient con­sid­er­a­tion to pos­si­ble risks re­lat­ed to sub­sea div­ing be­fore re­pairs were un­der­tak­en on the pipeline.

But what mat­ters most is that five able-bod­ied men left their homes that day to do a job and four of them nev­er re­turned.

A tod­dler still waits for his fa­ther to come home, un­able to un­der­stand that he will nev­er see him again. The pain is still raw for the wid­ows. Fam­i­lies, robbed of their main in­come earn­ers, al­so face fi­nan­cial strug­gles.

One year lat­er, they all de­serve some an­swers and ac­tion on the is­sues now af­fect­ing them.