SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

The man who has been blamed for pre­vent­ing the res­cue of four trapped LM­CS divers on Feb­ru­ary 25 will tes­ti­fy be­fore the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry (CoE) set up to in­ves­ti­gate their deaths this morn­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to ev­i­dence giv­en by sev­er­al peo­ple to the Com­mis­sion since it start­ed, Collin Piper, Paria’s ter­mi­nal op­er­a­tions man­ag­er, was the per­son who gave in­struc­tions that no one should en­ter the pipeline to at­tempt to res­cue the men.

In his state­ments, Piper ad­mit­ted that he gave the or­der but said it was un­safe to at­tempt a res­cue.

Both Piper and Paria’s gen­er­al man­ag­er, Mush­taq Mo­hammed were due to ap­pear be­fore the Com­mis­sion on Tues­day but due to the com­pa­ny’s late sub­mis­sion of doc­u­ments, the hear­ing was post­poned. Those doc­u­ments in­clud­ed a sup­ple­men­tary state­ment from Piper, in which he tried to ex­plain his rea­son­ing for pre­vent­ing divers from at­tempt­ing to res­cue the men.

“At para­graph 98 of my prin­ci­pal state­ment I in­di­cat­ed that, among oth­er things, I dis­cussed with the ICT (In­ci­dent Com­mand Team) that LM­CS were div­ing in­to the pipeline in an en­tire­ly un­planned man­ner,” Piper’s lat­est state­ment said.

He goes on to quote an­oth­er part of his pre­vi­ous state­ment which states, “I in­struct­ed Visham to in­form LM­CS that div­ing in­to the pipeline was not al­lowed be­cause it was too dan­ger­ous based on ad­vice re­ceived and the rel­e­vant fac­tors.”

In his sup­ple­men­tary state­ment, Piper said the In­ter­na­tion­al Safe­ty Guide for Oil Tankers and Ter­mi­nals was the au­thor­i­ta­tive text in the oil and gas in­dus­try on tanker safe­ty and pol­lu­tion pre­ven­tion.

Piper said this guide was pub­lished by the In­ter­na­tion­al Cham­ber of Ship­ping, the Oil Com­pa­nies In­ter­na­tion­al Ma­rine Fo­rum and the In­ter­na­tion­al As­so­ci­a­tion of Ports and Har­bors.

In his pre­vi­ous state­ment, Piper said the ac­ci­dent’s lone sur­vivor, Christo­pher Boodram told him on the night of the ac­ci­dent that he did not be­lieve his col­leagues were alive.

In his tes­ti­mo­ny at the start of the com­mis­sion, Boodram hot­ly de­nied this, say­ing he would nev­er say that as he had been beg­ging every­one he came in­to con­tact with af­ter he was res­cued to help his col­leagues.

The CoE was set up to in­ves­ti­gate the deaths of four LM­CS divers in the af­ter­math of an ac­ci­dent at Paria’s Pointe-a-Pierre fa­cil­i­ty on Feb­ru­ary 25.

On that day, Boodram, Kaz­im Ali Ju­nior, Yusuf Hen­ry, Fyzal Kur­ban and Rishi Na­gas­sar were do­ing main­te­nance work on a 30-inch pipeline when tragedy struck.

The five were em­ploy­ees of LM­CS Lim­it­ed and were car­ry­ing out main­te­nance works at Paria’s Berth 6 when the ac­ci­dent oc­curred.

Boodram sur­vived but his four col­leagues did not.

LM­CS has ac­cused Paria of pre­vent­ing res­cue as the com­pa­ny said Boodram made it clear his col­leagues were alive when he was res­cued. An over­whelm­ing na­tion­al out­cry for jus­tice for the four even­tu­al­ly led to the com­mis­sion be­ing set up to in­ves­ti­gate the ac­ci­dent.