Eliz­a­beth Gon­za­les

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

The To­ba­go Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency is in­ves­ti­gat­ing an­oth­er oil spill, which was re­port­ed on Mon­day.

The spill, which was not iden­ti­fied out at sea, in­stead washed ashore and found its way be­hind the ANR In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port dur­ing the pas­sage of Hur­ri­cane Beryl.

This was re­vealed by To­ba­go Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency di­rec­tor Al­lan Stew­art, who con­firmed an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to this spill was launched.

He said, “There were two ma­rine in­ci­dents, one of which may have spewed oil in­to the sea. The in­ves­ti­ga­tion is still go­ing on and it may not be re­lat­ed to the Gulf­stream stream.

“We re­ceived word of this yes­ter­day and we saw video from the THA that oil was seen south of the ANR Robin­son In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port run­way.

“To­day, we start­ed the in­ves­ti­ga­tion. We didn’t come away with any­thing pos­i­tive, but we treat­ed with it, and ob­vi­ous­ly, we would have had a re­sponse plan and re­sources avail­able in the event of any­thing like that. We will have to do the mop­ping up.”

He said the own­er of a large fish­ing boat came for­ward and ad­mit­ted that his ves­sel got in­to dif­fi­cul­ties and start­ed spew­ing oil.

He de­scribed it as un­for­tu­nate but did not think the in­ves­ti­ga­tion would point to the Gulf­stream.

Last week, En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries Min­is­ter Stu­art Young an­nounced that all the oil had been re­moved from the ves­sel. He said sal­vaging at­tempts to tow the ves­sel to Trinidad were ex­pect­ed to be­gin soon.

The wreck­age should be re­moved by the end of this month.

The ves­sel over­turned on Feb­ru­ary 7 spew­ing bunker fu­el dev­as­tat­ing 15 kilo­me­tres of shore­line.

Dur­ing con­tain­ment, bad weath­er dis­rupt­ed op­er­a­tions, caus­ing fu­el to leak.