RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Thou­sands of peo­ple have signed a pe­ti­tion call­ing for the dis­missal of the board of Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed, pend­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to the trag­ic deaths of four divers who were trapped in­side a 30-inch di­am­e­ter pipeline over the week­end.

The pe­ti­tion was start­ed by at­tor­ney Vanes­sa Soo­brat­tie and got al­most 25,000 sig­na­tures with­in 24 hours.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, Soo­brat­tie said the in­flux of sig­na­tures demon­strat­ed the out­rage that peo­ple were feel­ing for the divers—Fyzal Kur­ban, Rishi Nages­sar, Yusuff Hen­ry and Kaz­im Ali Jr—who died af­ter they got sucked in­to the pipeline on Feb­ru­ary 25.

The men were con­tract work­ers at LM­CS Lim­it­ed, which pro­vides project man­age­ment, en­gi­neer­ing de­sign, pro­cure­ment, ma­rine con­struc­tion and land con­struc­tion ser­vices (in­clu­sive of div­ing-re­lat­ed un­der­wa­ter ser­vices and ma­rine lo­gis­tics sup­port).

LCMS was con­tract­ed by Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Lim­it­ed.

“I start­ed the pe­ti­tion on In­sta­gram. As an at­tor­ney, when I re­alised that if an in­ves­ti­ga­tion was go­ing to be done, it seemed log­i­cal to have the board re­moved. The pos­si­bil­i­ty ex­ists that poli­cies and ev­i­dence could be tam­pered with. To me, in the in­ter­est of a fair in­ves­ti­ga­tion, the prop­er step would have been for the board to step down, re­sign or be re­moved,” Soo­brat­tie said.

She added, “There is a clear lack of HSE poli­cies. Pro­to­cols were breached and in the ab­sence of an in­de­pen­dent in­ves­ti­ga­tion, we want to see fair­ness for the fam­i­lies.”

Soo­brat­tie said she has not yet reached out to the fam­i­ly but had no hes­i­ta­tion in help­ing them.

“I want to say I am tru­ly sad­dened. The pop­u­la­tion needs to un­der­stand what hap­pened. We knew where these divers were, we had vol­un­teers will­ing to go in and get them out at no li­a­bil­i­ty to Paria and for what­ev­er rea­son, they were blocked. That is why peo­ple are out­raged,” she added.

The divers were con­duct­ing main­te­nance works on a 30-inch di­ame­tre seabed crude oil pipeline at Berth No 6, Pointe-a-Pierre, when they were sucked in­to the pipeline. On­ly one of them, Christo­pher Boodram, was saved.

Re­cov­ery ef­forts are now un­der­way to find Nages­sar’s body.

Au­top­sies on the bod­ies of Kur­ban, Ali Jr and Hen­ry will be done pend­ing the re­sults of COVID-19 tests.

A five-mem­ber in­de­pen­dent team has been ap­point­ed by En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young to probe the tragedy. 

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