En­vi­ron­men­tal group Fish­er­men and Friends of the Sea (FFOS) is re­port­ing an­oth­er oil spill in the Gulf of Paria, to­day.

The group post­ed videos in its so­cial me­dia pages show­ing the spill in the wa­ters of the Gulf, and warned “all fish­ers, sea­far­ers and mariners to be on the look­out for this oil”.

“Fish­er­men and Friends of the Sea have re­ceived re­ports of an oil spill in the vicin­i­ty of the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery stretch­ing all the way to Clax­ton Bay. At the mo­ment the oil is mov­ing in norther­ly di­rec­tion and is ap­prox­i­mate­ly one nau­ti­cal mile from the coast,” the group said in its Face­book post.

FFOS says it has alert­ed the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties about the spill, name­ly the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA), the In­sti­tute of Ma­rine Af­fairs (IMA) and the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries.

“Our Au­thor­i­ties must ini­ti­ate the Na­tion­al Oil Spill Con­tin­gency Plan (NOSCP) with the ut­most ur­gency be­fore this heavy crude reach­es on­shore,” FFOS said, in ad­di­tion to de­mand­ing full trans­paren­cy on this cur­rent spill, as it not­ed, “every drop of hy­dro­car­bon has an ever-last­ing im­pact on our ma­rine ecosys­tem”.

“We are call­ing on the Au­thor­i­ties to make pub­lic, the cause of the spill, vol­ume, na­ture of the hy­dro­car­bon spilled, and those who are re­spon­si­ble.  Fur­ther­more, pray that our Gov­ern­ment/EMA act in the in­ter­est of our en­vi­ron­ment and pros­e­cute this pol­luter.”

Ac­cord­ing to FFOS, since 2015, there have been in ex­cess of 377 oil spills in this coun­try, but “no one has ever been charged or pros­e­cut­ed.”