Richard Lord

Petrotrin pres­i­dent Khalid Has­sanali says the state-owned oil com­pa­ny has spent $8 mil­lion so far to clean up the spill at La Brea.Has­sanali made the com­ment dur­ing a news con­fer­ence at the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter in St Clair yes­ter­day.It fol­lowed a sec­ond meet­ing be­tween com­pa­ny of­fi­cials, led by chair­man Lind­say Gillette, and the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil, chaired by act­ing Prime Min­is­ter Er­rol McLeod, in the past four days.

The largest oil spill in re­cent his­to­ry oc­curred on De­cem­ber 17 over a nine-mile area of the La Brea coast­line.Petrotrin hired Oil Spills Re­sponse Lim­it­ed of the Unit­ed States to as­sist with the clean-up ex­er­cise last week and work is con­tin­u­ing.Gillette told re­porters the cost is ex­pect­ed to be much more than $8 mil­lion in the end."It is go­ing to be a lot more spend­ing but when it is done we will say this is what it cost."We are not spar­ing any­thing, we are go­ing to spend what­ev­er is re­quired to make sure this thing goes away."

In re­sponse to a call by Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley for an ur­gent in­de­pen­dent in­quiry to be done on the spill, Gillette said "that was his (Row­ley's) view."Gillette said the com­pa­ny had com­pe­tent peo­ple who were com­mit­ted to ad­dress­ing the mat­ter. He said Petrotrin was al­so work­ing with the En­vi­ron­men­tal Au­thor­i­ty in that re­gard.

Mean­while, Has­sanali said over the past two weeks of clean-up op­er­a­tions, the com­pa­ny had col­lect­ed about 1,100 to 1,200 bar­rels of oil from the La Brea coast­line. He said on Tues­day and Wednes­day of this week, pro­test­ers in La Brea had pre­vent­ed work­ers from en­gag­ing in clean-up op­er­a­tions as they were de­mand­ing more em­ploy­ment. How­ev­er, Has­sanali said there have been "un­for­tu­nate in­ci­dents" be­cause the work­load had de­creased.

Has­sanali said more man­u­al work would be done in the com­ing days to pre­vent re­con­t­a­m­i­na­tion by some of the heavy equip­ment. Con­se­quent­ly, he said, there will be op­por­tu­ni­ties over next week or two.Petrotrin's man­ag­er health, safe­ty and the en­vi­ron­ment (HSE) Shyam Di­al, who al­so spoke at the con­fer­ence, said the La Brea oil spill has had "min­i­mal im­pact on birds and fish. There has been no ma­jor fish kill, there has been no ma­jor en­vi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter in terms of dead birds, float­ing crabs."

Di­al said Petrotrin had al­so been fol­low­ing the best prac­tices to clean the spill in sen­si­tive ar­eas and shore­line ar­eas. He said pro­pel­lors were be­ing used to dis­perse the oil and rough sea con­di­tions were al­so as­sist­ing in dis­pers­ing the oil. No large quan­ti­ty of chem­i­cals have been used to clean the spill, he added.

He said there were a num­ber of nat­ur­al oil seeps in the ma­rine area of La Brea, adding that nat­u­ral­ly, oil will con­tin­u­ous­ly seep from those ar­eas in­to the wa­ter. Di­al said that oil won't be seen on the sur­face be­cause there were mi­crobes in the wa­ter and fish and oth­er aquat­ic an­i­mals adapt to those con­di­tions over years and build up a re­sis­tance."This will help us in our re­me­di­a­tion and re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion of that whole area," Di­al told re­porters.

In re­sponse to an­oth­er ques­tion, vice-pres­i­dent ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion Ja­maludin Khan said the oil spill did not af­fect the start of the seis­mic sur­vey.En­vi­ron­men­tal­ists have ob­ject­ed to the sur­vey, say­ing it would have ad­verse ef­fects on the fish. Khan said the ex­er­cise was in progress. He said the project start­ed at Crew's Inn, Ch­aguara­mas, ear­li­er this week in the com­pa­ny's east­ern field wa­ters.