A con­stant chal­lenge for this en­er­gy pro­duc­ing, heav­i­ly in­dus­tri­alised na­tion is man­ag­ing and mit­i­gat­ing the ef­fects of in­dus­tri­al and en­vi­ron­men­tal in­ci­dents.

As small is­lands in the South­ern Caribbean, a re­gion of sig­nif­i­cant oil and gas pro­duc­tion, there are con­di­tions with­in and out­side this ge­o­graph­ic space that can trig­ger in­ci­dents with se­vere con­se­quences for health and the en­vi­ron­ment.

Res­i­dents in com­mu­ni­ties bor­der­ing en­er­gy and man­u­fac­tur­ing plants have ex­pe­ri­enced ex­plo­sions, fires and rup­tured pipelines that have dis­rupt­ed their lives, af­fect­ed their health and harmed the en­vi­ron­ment.

The To­ba­go oil spill, caused by a mys­te­ri­ous cap­sized ves­sel, is the lat­est re­minder that mar­itime ac­tiv­i­ty al­so pos­es se­ri­ous threats to the ma­rine en­vi­ron­ment and coastal com­mu­ni­ties.

The pro­found and far-reach­ing con­se­quences of these in­ci­dents go well be­yond im­me­di­ate phys­i­cal and fi­nan­cial dam­ages.

This na­tion has suf­fered air, wa­ter and soil pol­lu­tion, dam­age to ma­rine life and coastal wet­lands and un­told long-term en­vi­ron­men­tal dam­age from many in­ci­dents with­in our ter­res­tri­al and mar­itime bound­aries.

And long be­fore the To­ba­go spill, the need to strength­en risk man­age­ment and pri­ori­tise con­crete ac­tions to re­duce risks and mit­i­gate their ef­fects was very clear.

With more than a cen­tu­ry of oil pro­duc­tion his­to­ry, T&T has had ex­pe­ri­ences with oil spills go­ing back decades that should in­form re­sponse poli­cies and pro­to­cols.

One of the dead­liest oc­curred on Ju­ly 19, 1979, ap­prox­i­mate­ly 18 kilo­me­tres off the east coast of To­ba­go, when the 331-me­tre-long Aegean Cap­tain, car­ry­ing 200,000 tonnes of crude oil to Sin­ga­pore from Aru­ba, col­lid­ed with the 325-me­tre-long At­lantic Em­press, which was tak­ing 276,000 tonnes of crude oil from Sau­di Ara­bia to Beau­mont, Texas, in the USA.

That ac­ci­dent be­tween ships with a ca­pac­i­ty equiv­a­lent to 3.5 mil­lion bar­rels of oil re­sult­ed in 27 fa­tal­i­ties and left 259 square kilo­me­tres of the Caribbean Sea cov­ered with an oil sheen that reached with­in eight kilo­me­tres of To­ba­go.

A se­ri­ous en­vi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter was on­ly avert­ed by an ocean cur­rent that caused the spill to flow north in­stead of to­ward To­ba­go.

Just over a decade ago, in De­cem­ber 2013, a ma­jor pipeline spill at the then Petrotrin re­fin­ery, or ap­prox­i­mate­ly 7,500 bar­rels of oil, af­fect­ed La Brea and en­vi­rons and sev­er­al beach­es along Trinidad’s south-west­ern penin­su­la.

In 2017, a rup­ture in the base of a large pe­tro­le­um stor­age tank at the re­fin­ery caused oil to spill in­to the Gulf of Paria and spread as far as the Venezuela coast­line near Guiria.

Alarms were al­so sound­ed about the po­ten­tial for a ma­jor eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter from The Nabari­ma, an aban­doned Venezue­lan-owned tanker, when it start­ed sink­ing in late 2020, threat­en­ing to spill up to 1.3 mil­lion bar­rels of oil in­to the Gulf of Paria.

Have any lessons been learned from these and oth­er spills? Is there any con­cern about the im­pact to fish­eries, or how such in­ci­dents set back T&T’s strug­gling tourism sec­tor?

Amid all of the fin­ger-point­ing and ac­cu­sa­tions swirling around the lat­est in­ci­dent, these are ques­tions that need to be an­swered.

It might al­so be time to re­view the Na­tion­al Oil Spill Con­tin­gency Plan (NOSCP), which was im­ple­ment­ed a decade ago in an­tic­i­pa­tion of in­creased ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion ac­tiv­i­ty. Since then, there have been tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vance­ments, in­clud­ing rapid­ly evolv­ing ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence as well as cli­mate change, that might not have been fac­tored in­to the plan.

These are crit­i­cal is­sues that de­mand im­me­di­ate at­ten­tion and ac­tion.