To Mr Al­lan Bachan of the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA):

On Sat­ur­day Jan­u­ary 11, Fish­er­men and Friends of the Sea (FFOS) joined with fish­er­men from var­i­ous de­pots around the Gulf of Paria, and went on a fact-find­ing mis­sion to de­ter­mine the im­pact of the oil spills and the sta­tus of seis­mic sur­vey­ing ac­tiv­i­ty. We de­ter­mined the fol­low­ing:

1. Off La Brea Point, we dis­cov­ered and pho­tographed co­pi­ous amounts of sub-sea oil and re­cov­ered hand­fuls for the record. In do­ing so we demon­strate that the im­pact of the spill re­mains un­con­tained. Petrotrin, un­trou­bled, an­nounced that the seis­mic sur­vey has of­fi­cial­ly be­gun–a high­ly fright­en­ing sit­u­a­tion.

2. We ob­served and filmed an un­re­port­ed and on­go­ing spill of hy­dro­car­bons ap­prox­i­mate­ly 150 me­tres south east of Petrotrin's Trin­i­ty Plat­form 2.

3. Seis­mic boats were ac­tive in the wa­ter but it was not clear whether blast­ing had ac­tu­al­ly com­menced.

Based on the ev­i­dence that the cur­rent oil spills have not been brought un­der con­trol, and the fact that there are un­known quan­ti­ties of sub­merged oil in the en­vi­ron­ment, and that Petrotrin has not stat­ed how much oil has spilled in­to the Gulf (save and ex­cept for the 400,000 gal­lons spilled from the Pointe-a-Pierre fa­cil­i­ty), we are re­spect­ful­ly ask­ing you (EMA) to put on hold the Cer­tifi­cate of En­vi­ron­men­tal Clear­ance (CEC) is­sued to Petrotrin to car­ry out the seis­mic sur­veys un­til a clean bill of health is giv­en to the Gulf of Paria from these un­solved oil spills.

This is crit­i­cal to our fish­er-folk, as they are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a dras­tic col­lapse in sales of Gulf of Paria catch since these oil spills be­gan.

Our mem­bers on the north east coast of Trinidad and on the north east coast of To­ba­go–where we have dis­cov­ered two new seis­mic sur­veys are planned to be­gin in March and May 14–have man­dat­ed that we write to you re­quest­ing spe­cial con­sid­er­a­tion to post­pone ap­prov­ing any seis­mic "ex­plo­sions" dur­ing spawn­ing times, in spawn­ing ar­eas and in mi­gra­to­ry path­ways of com­mer­cial fish, un­til suf­fi­cient base­line da­ta is gath­ered.

Our mem­bers are ask­ing that this da­ta be al­so col­lect­ed dur­ing and af­ter the pro­posed seis­mic sur­vey. This will help to clar­i­fy the im­pacts, par­tic­u­lar­ly on the com­mer­cial vi­a­bil­i­ty of the af­fect­ed fish­eries, and al­low for ac­cu­rate cal­cu­la­tion of com­pen­sa­tion mat­ters.

Gary Aboud, Sec­re­tary

Ter­rence Bed­doe, Pres­i­dent

Fish­er­men and Friends of the Sea