Resh­ma Ra­goonath

US oil spill ex­pert Bri­an Gove says the oil spill rav­aging the south­west­ern coast­line is "chal­leng­ing" and clean-up op­er­a­tions may take up to three months.Yes­ter­day Gove, tech­ni­cal ad­vis­er on health and safe­ty at Oil Spill Re­sponse Ltd, Flori­da, USA, to­geth­er with En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine, toured clean-up op­er­a­tions at Point Saube, La Brea, where the ma­jor mop­ping up ef­forts have been con­cen­trat­ed.The US ex­pert said the lo­ca­tion of the oil spill had made clean­ing up a bit dif­fi­cult for his team, con­trac­tors and Petrotrin.

"This one is a lit­tle bit chal­leng­ing in that we do not have ac­cess. We on­ly have the one ac­cess road and it's quite a bit of oil for up to a two-mile stretch. Usu­al­ly we are lucky to have a lit­tle more ac­cess," he said.Gove said they have a slight ad­van­tage at Point Saube since the cur­rent was bring­ing the oil to that area which was mak­ing it eas­i­er for the work­ers to col­lect it."We are tak­ing ad­van­tage of the nat­ur­al col­lec­tion point," he said.

Last week Petrotrin es­ti­mat­ed clean-up op­er­a­tions would take at least a week but yes­ter­day Gove re­vised the time­frame. He said it would take two weeks for heavy clean­ing of the oil and three months for the light clean­ing.Ram­nar­ine, ad­dress­ing re­porters af­ter the tour, agreed with Gove's time­frame. He said the lim­it­ed ac­cess roads to the beach "af­fect the abil­i­ty to get equip­ment, to mo­bilise equip­ment to the site."

He as­sured that heavy equip­ment, such as back­hoes and ex­ca­va­tors, were be­ing brought to the ar­eas in­ac­ces­si­ble by road by be­ing dri­ven up the coast­line along the beach.Gove said at present the oil booms (plas­tic bar­ri­ers) placed at Point Saube and at Cof­fee Beach "have been work­ing ef­fec­tive­ly, but booms do need to be main­tained so it does change with each tide."We have a high­er tide com­ing in this evening (yes­ter­day) and we will have to mon­i­tor that but we have ad­di­tion­al booms on stand­by."

Yes­ter­day Ram­nar­ine said an In­sti­tute of Ma­rine Af­fairs pre­lim­i­nary re­port had said the oil found at La Brea is Bunker C, a prod­uct of the re­fin­ing process.He said Bunker C fu­el had sim­i­lar char­ac­ter­is­tics to crude oil and ad­mit­ted that "both crude oil and Bunker C can be prob­lem­at­ic."Ram­nar­ine said a re­port would be done on the oil spill, which he said was a les­son for Petrotrin, and the rec­om­men­da­tions from that ex­pe­ri­ence would as­sist in im­prov­ing the Na­tion­al Oil Spill Con­tin­gency Plan.