Petrotrin has ad­mit­ted that of 11 spills, one spill was of 7,800 bar­rels–ap­prox­i­mate­ly 400,000 gal­lons, but has not stat­ed the to­tal es­ti­mat­ed spillage from the oth­er ten.Af­ter weeks of ques­tion­ing, Petrotrin fi­nal­ly ad­mit­ted that Corex­it9500 was used for on­ly "two days" and was used more than a mile off­shore as pro­vid­ed for in the Na­tion­al Oil Spill Con­tin­gency Plan.

�2 On Box­ing Day an FFOS del­e­ga­tion ob­served and pho­tographed a Petrotrin ves­sel spray­ing nox­ious chem­i­cals next to the La Brea Jet­ty. That was ten days af­ter the spills be­gan, and not as stat­ed a 100 me­tres off shore.

�2 On Jan­u­ary 6, 2014, a del­e­ga­tion of fish­er­folk pres­i­dents, ob­served aer­i­al spray­ing of a pun­gent chem­i­cal ap­prox­i­mate­ly 400 me­tres from the shore­line of Car­rot Shed Beach.

Can Petrotrin quan­ti­fy, from ver­i­fi­able records, what were the ex­act amounts of Corex­it ap­plied to the oil spill dur­ing the ad­mit­ted two days, and what were the oth­er nox­ious chem­i­cals, aer­i­al sprayed, up un­til Jan­u­ary 6, some 17 days af­ter the spills be­gan?

What were the quan­ti­ties of the al­leged "oth­er" dis­per­sants used? The to­tal quan­ti­ty used would be a start­ing point for de­ter­min­ing the resid­ual tox­i­c­i­ty of the im­pact­ed area in the Gulf of Paria and will guide the na­tion as to the tox­i­c­i­ty of the food chain in the Gulf of Paria.

Has the EMA not in­ves­ti­gat­ed these crit­i­cal con­cerns?

The lessons learned from the BP cleanup in the Gulf, showed that us­ing Corex­it in­creased the tox­i­c­i­ty of the spilt oil by 52 times, poi­soned the food chain and se­ri­ous­ly en­dan­gered the health of work­ers and res­i­dents. Corex­it re­moves the vis­i­ble oil from the sur­face and leaves it sus­pend­ed in the wa­ter col­umn, im­per­cep­ti­ble to the naked eye but al­ter­ing the chem­istry of the af­fect­ed area, with se­ri­ous long term im­pli­ca­tions for the fish­ery and for hu­man health.

Petrotrin, the EMA and the IMA have not in­di­cat­ed what sam­pling regime is in place to de­ter­mine the con­cen­tra­tions of Corex­it left in the fish­ery, and its resid­ual tox­i­c­i­ty.

�2 Where are they sam­pling for oil in the Gulf fish­ery?

�2 Are top, bot­tom and wa­ter col­umn sam­ples be­ing tak­en?

�2 How will they sam­ple for resid­ual Corex­it?

�2 Will the re­sults be made pub­lic?

What was the sam­pling regime for air qual­i­ty? What date did the air qual­i­ty sam­pling com­mence? Will the orig­i­nal air qual­i­ty re­sults tak­en in Cof­fee Vil­lage by Kaizen be shared with the af­fect­ed com­mu­ni­ties?FFOS con­tin­ues to in­sist that good pub­lic ad­min­is­tra­tion re­quires that Petrotrin and the PP Gov­ern­ment post­pone the seis­mic air gun ex­plo­sions un­til the oil spill im­pacts are con­tained.

We pro­pose that Petrotrin lo­cate the FFOS re­port­ed and filmed sus­pend­ed and sub­merged Corex­it oil and vac­u­um same from the seabeds, find the mul­ti­ple four square mile filmed oil slicks and sur­round them (down cur­rent with booms and skim­mers) in an arc to con­tain their wake of death. Noth­ing less will suf­fice.

Gary Aboud

Sec­re­tary, FFOS