At 3.09 am last Sun­day, an alarm sound­ed on Well Ser­vices Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny’s Rig 110, alert­ing the 75 work­ers on board the fa­cil­i­ty, which was drilling for hy­dro­car­bons in the Her­itage Off­shore East Field in the Gulf of Paria, that an emer­gency had oc­curred. As no emer­gency drill was sched­uled for that morn­ing, most of the work­ers re­spond­ed im­me­di­ate­ly to the alarm, scram­bling to put on life jack­ets and get to the emer­gency muster point. When the work crew got to safe­ty, a head count tak­en by the safe­ty mar­shalls would have found one work­er in­jured and an­oth­er miss­ing.

Up to yes­ter­day, 45-year-old Pe­te Phillip was still miss­ing, with whol­ly state-owned Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny out­lin­ing in a news re­lease that it con­tin­ues to pri­ori­tise its sup­port to the re­sponse ef­forts. The pri­ma­ry fo­cus of their joint en­deav­ours re­mains the search and res­cue op­er­a­tion for Mr Phillip.

In re­sponse to the in­ci­dent, the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries said it would be ap­point­ing a team to con­duct a de­tailed in­ves­ti­ga­tion and to pre­pare and sub­mit a com­pre­hen­sive re­port of the find­ings.

The pop­u­la­tion has sev­er­al le­git­i­mate ex­pec­ta­tions of this de­tailed in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

The first is that the best and most cred­i­ble com­pa­ny in the world for this kind of en­quiry should be re­tained, fol­low­ing the guide­lines in T&T’s pro­cure­ment leg­is­la­tion. There would be no need for a lengthy and cost­ly Com­mis­sion of En­quiry (CoE)—as was the case with the Paria Fu­el in­ves­ti­ga­tion, fol­low­ing the Feb­ru­ary 2022 in­ci­dent in which four divers lost their lives—if the right firm with the ap­pro­pri­ate in­ves­ti­ga­to­ry ex­pe­ri­ence in off­shore en­er­gy sec­tor in­ci­dents is hired.

Sec­ond­ly, the in­ves­ti­ga­tion must be ex­pe­di­tious and thor­ough, with a laser fo­cus on what caused the col­lapse of Rig 110 and whether the evac­u­a­tion pro­ce­dures con­formed to world-class stan­dards.

And third­ly, the com­pre­hen­sive re­port of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion must not on­ly be sub­mit­ted to the Min­istry of En­er­gy, its unredact­ed find­ings must be laid in Par­lia­ment and made pub­lic. In this case, it would be scan­dalous and in­tol­er­a­ble if there were to be a re­peat of the En­er­gy Min­istry’s fail­ure to make pub­lic the re­port of the fa­tal in­ci­dent in June 2023 at the Ni­Quan gas-to-liq­uids plant in Pointe-a-Pierre.

Among the is­sues the cur­rent in­ves­ti­ga­tion must re­veal is: whether Rig 110 was built 43 years ago; what is the ex­pect­ed nat­ur­al life of a jack-up drilling rig in con­di­tions such as the Gulf of Paria; when was the last time the as­set in­tegri­ty of the rig was as­cer­tained or cer­ti­fied; what was the main­te­nance sched­ule on the rig since its ac­qui­si­tion by Well Ser­vices Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny in 2009 and what cor­ro­sion-pre­ven­tion mea­sures were put in place to pro­tect the rig.

Giv­en its 57-year his­to­ry, and its rep­u­ta­tion re­sult­ing from work for al­most all of the en­er­gy com­pa­nies that have op­er­at­ed in T&T in that pe­ri­od, it goes with­out say­ing that the in­ves­ti­ga­tors should ex­pect the full co­op­er­a­tion of Well Ser­vices Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny, which owns and op­er­ates Rig 110.

T&T seems not to have learnt from any of the en­er­gy-based dis­as­ters that have struck in re­cent times, which is quite alarm­ing giv­en that the Paria CoE raised se­ri­ous is­sues about our health and safe­ty pro­to­cols in the sec­tor.

We must learn the lessons from our past fa­tal dis­as­ters, in­stead of re­peat­ing them.