Fish­er­men turned to Pres­i­dent An­tho­ny Car­mona yes­ter­day, seek­ing his help to pre­vent planned off­shore seis­mic bomb­ing by a lo­cal oil com­pa­ny on No­vem­ber 1.Gary Aboud, of the lob­by group Fish­er­men and Friends of the Sea, said the group was hope­ful that some­thing would come out of the meet­ing with Car­mona be­cause the group was not will­ing to re­sort to civ­il dis­obe­di­ence."The meet­ing with the Pres­i­dent is one of the last hopes we have," he said.

Aboud ques­tioned the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA)'s de­ci­sion to is­sue Cer­tifi­cates of En­vi­ron­men­tal Clear­ance (CECs) for the project.The group met the Pres­i­dent yes­ter­day morn­ing at the Pres­i­dent's Of­fice, St Ann's, af­ter writ­ing to him ap­peal­ing for help.The group pre­vi­ous­ly met with Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar two weeks ago to have the is­sue of seis­mic bomb­ing ad­dressed.

"Seis­mic bomb­ing," as the group has chris­tened the ac­tiv­i­ty, is usu­al­ly re­ferred to as seis­mic test­ing or re­flec­tive seis­mol­o­gy. It in­volves caus­ing un­der­wa­ter acoustic ex­plo­sions and analysing the re­flect­ed sound waves to look for pos­si­ble drilling points for oil and gas."The sound waves re­port­ed­ly dis­turb and dis­tress ma­rine species.Aboud claimed the ac­tiv­i­ty had the ef­fect de­stroy­ing the coun­try's re­new­able fish­ery re­source and af­fect­ed over 52,000 stake­hold­ers.

The group says lo­cal oil com­pa­nies should be reg­u­lat­ed in the same way as in Aus­tralia, Cana­da, Eng­land, Ire­land, New Zealand, Nor­way, the USA and Venezuela.A re­lease from the group said: "We are con­fi­dent that our meet­ing with (the Pres­i­dent) will move us clos­er to solv­ing the cri­sis in which we have found our­selves where the EMA is grant­i­ng the big, well known oil com­pa­nies CECs with­out re­quir­ing any En­vi­ron­ment Im­pact As­sess­ments (EIAs).