Over 100 peo­ple were strand­ed for more than 18 hours at sea on Wednes­day af­ter a fire on board the MV Cabo Star dis­rupt­ed op­er­a­tions.

An of­fi­cial from the T&T In­ter-Is­land Trans­porta­tion Com­pa­ny said yes­ter­day that 80 pas­sen­gers, 141 ve­hi­cles and around 35 crew mem­bers were on board as the ves­sel made its way from the Port of Scar­bor­ough.

How­ev­er, at 11.23 pm, a fire broke out in the en­gine room. In a re­lease, the Port Au­thor­i­ty of T&T said the fire was iso­lat­ed and ex­tin­guished by the crew in ac­cor­dance with ves­sel’s emer­gency pro­to­cols. It added that when the ves­sel is docked, a thor­ough in­ves­ti­ga­tion will be con­duct­ed and re­pair works will be­gin.

While the re­pairs are be­ing done, the au­thor­i­ty ad­vised that ve­hi­cles weigh­ing up to 7,000 kilo­grammes will be ac­com­mo­dat­ed on the APT James, Buc­coo Reef and Galleons Pas­sage. The au­thor­i­ty added that there is no in­ter­rup­tion to the in­ter-is­land fer­ry ser­vice and all sail­ings re­main as sched­uled.

Post­ing an up­date to so­cial me­dia yes­ter­day, Deputy Chief Sec­re­tary of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly, Dr Faith B Yis­rael, said the THA was aware of the sit­u­a­tion with the Cabo Star and main­tained con­tact with the Port Au­thor­i­ty to en­sure all is well.

“We’ve been en­sur­ing the wel­fare needs of the pas­sen­gers and the crew are tak­en care of while they are at sea. We are eter­nal­ly grate­ful that the process of tow­ing the ves­sel has al­ready be­gun and they should be docked soon. Of course, this is not a com­fort­able sit­u­a­tion for any­one, the pas­sen­gers are cer­tain­ly on the ves­sel way longer than they had an­tic­i­pat­ed than any­one had an­tic­i­pat­ed. So, we un­der­stand that this is a very un­com­fort­able space for them to be in,” she said.

She added that the THA did every­thing in its pow­er to en­sure the smooth co­or­di­na­tion need­ed.

“We are thank­ful that the sit­u­a­tion is not as dire as we thought it was when we got the dis­tress call in the mid­dle of the night. We’ve had our To­ba­go Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency in­volved in the co­or­di­na­tion of the re­sponse. We have been in con­tact with the To­ba­go Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty to en­sure that a med­ical post is set up just in case any­one needs im­me­di­ate med­ical at­ten­tion hav­ing come off of the ves­sel,” she said.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that the ves­sel was even­tu­al­ly docked back in Scar­bor­ough around 5 pm yes­ter­day, and ex­pe­ri­enced dif­fi­cul­ties com­ing to a full stop.

Some of the pas­sen­gers need­ed med­ical at­ten­tion, and re­ceived as­sis­tance on the scene, while oth­ers were es­cort­ed to near­by med­ical fa­cil­i­ties.