To­ba­go fish­er­folk af­fect­ed by the oil spill may soon be able to re­turn to their fish­ing de­pot in Lam­beau a month af­ter a barge ran aground off the coast of Cove on Feb­ru­ary 7, spew­ing bunker fu­el in­to the sea.

The fish­er­men were tem­porar­i­ly re­lo­cat­ed to the Food Hub fa­cil­i­ty in Scar­bor­ough.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, di­rec­tor of To­ba­go Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency, Al­lan Stew­art said the team is fi­nal­ly re­gain­ing con­trol of the area.

He said, “I feel we are at the point where we can tell the fish­er­folk they can re­turn. Lam­beau is get­ting to where it ought to be see­ing the schools have re­opened and the area is do­ing fine.

“How­ev­er, we are pre­pared for any repet­i­tive ac­tions of the hy­dro­car­bon. There is al­ways a pos­si­bil­i­ty we could get a re­vis­it of the sub­stance again,” he said.

Mean­while, Stew­art said the is­land is still work­ing out its waste man­age­ment sys­tem.

“This is be­ing cal­cu­lat­ed care­ful­ly. Based on the ca­pac­i­ty they will utilise the land­fill as the tem­po­rary stor­age un­til they make up their minds on what would be the most ef­fec­tive as it re­lates to cost and al­so the ap­pli­ca­tion is con­cerned…The sit­u­a­tion is very flu­id as the dy­nam­ics al­lows for us to do that see­ing we have the frac tanks for stor­age while we make the nec­es­sary arrange­ments,” he ex­plained.

He said the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries is con­sid­er­ing an­oth­er method to con­tain­ing and re­triev­ing the re­main­ing fu­el in­side the barge out at sea.

To date, the team has col­lect­ed 39,737 bar­rels of liq­uid waste and 10,990 cu­bic me­tres of sol­id waste.

Cleanup at Scar­bor­ough is at an ad­vanced stage with the pow­er wash­ing of trapped hy­dro­car­bon along the shore­line and pave­ments work on­go­ing.

“Where the man­grove is con­cerned we are dis­cussing the best meth­ods to purge the man­grove of the fu­el that af­fect­ed it. There will be a re­port that will be pre­sent­ed to us soon on this from the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Agency so we can have an idea of how we would go for­ward with this plan,” Stew­art said.