An­na-Lisa Paul

Se­nior Re­porter

an­na-lisa.paul@guardian.co.tt

Five months af­ter an am­mo­nia leak at the Co­conut Grow­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (CGA) sent eight work­ers to hos­pi­tal and forced the clo­sure of near­by schools and busi­ness­es, an­oth­er leak has been de­tect­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to shop stew­ard Nathanael Bur­kett, the lat­est leak was dis­cov­ered around 8 am on Tues­day, com­ing from one of the am­mo­nia lines that serves the mar­garine de­part­ment and the co­conut oil pro­cess­ing plant.

The af­fect­ed area, which is lo­cat­ed at the west­ern end of the com­pound at East­ern Main Road, Laven­tille, has af­fect­ed close to 200 em­ploy­ees who have been un­able to work since Tues­day.

The em­ploy­ees have con­tin­ued to re­port for du­ty as ros­tered in shifts that run from 6 am to 2 pm, 2 pm to 10 pm, and 10 pm to 6 am, how­ev­er, Bur­kett said, while it was a “mi­nor leak,” the com­pro­mised line posed a health haz­ard to the work­ers.

In­di­cat­ing it posed an even greater risk as the line could rup­ture at any time, he said even though man­age­ment had re­quest­ed they re­turn to work, the work­ers could not com­ply due to the health and safe­ty risk.

Bur­kett said ef­forts were made to ad­dress the is­sue on Tues­day night.

He said, “They at­tempt­ed to re­duce the amount of am­mo­nia com­ing out of the line, but they were un­able to re­pair the ac­tu­al sys­tem, so noth­ing was re­al­ly done in a per­ma­nent sense.”

He said all of CGA’s pro­duc­tion process­es re­lied on the am­mo­nia lines be­ing func­tion­al to cool the sys­tems, and with a large num­ber of peo­ple work­ing in close prox­im­i­ty to where the leak was de­tect­ed, Bur­kett said they could not af­ford to take that risk.

On the is­sue of whether the forced down­time could re­sult in a loss of pay for the work­ers, Bur­kett said no.

“This is a unionised com­pa­ny, and they have to en­sure the work­ers get paid be­cause we do our part to come to work. It is on their end to en­sure that we have a safe work­ing en­vi­ron­ment, so we shouldn’t have any loss of pay on our end,” he said, adding, “Un­til they can guar­an­tee our safe­ty, we can­not com­ply with the or­der to work.”

In June, an am­mo­nia leak was de­tect­ed com­ing from the re­frig­er­a­tion sys­tem, and this was lat­er re­paired.

How­ev­er, one em­ploy­ee yes­ter­day said, “I don’t think they did enough then.”

He ac­cused man­age­ment of hav­ing done a quick fix to get the plant up and run­ning.

He said, “They can­not com­pro­mise the health and safe­ty of the work­ers. We want to work; we are com­ing to work, but the en­vi­ron­ment is not safe.”