Derek Achong

A lit­tle over six months af­ter four pro­fes­sion­al divers trag­i­cal­ly died while per­form­ing main­te­nance on a pipeline at Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed’s Pointe-a-Pierre fa­cil­i­ties, the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry tasked with in­ves­ti­gat­ing the in­ci­dent is set to be­gin its work to­day.

How­ev­er, the com­mis­sion, chaired by Queen’s Coun­sel Jerome Lynch, is not ex­pect­ed to plunge straight in­to the ev­i­dence of wit­ness­es, as it is first ex­pect­ed to ad­dress pro­ce­dur­al is­sues dur­ing hear­ings sched­uled for to­day and to­mor­row.

The pub­lic hear­ings will take place at Tow­er D at the In­ter­na­tion­al Wa­ter­front Cen­tre in Port-of-Spain, with a live stream avail­able on the com­mis­sion’s web­site- www.coe2022.com.

On Feb­ru­ary 25, five divers em­ployed with in­de­pen­dent con­trac­tor LM­CS Lim­it­ed - Christo­pher Boodram, Fyzal Kur­ban, Rishi Na­gas­sar, Kaz­im Ali Jr and Yusuf Hen­ry - were sucked in­to the 30 inch-di­am­e­ter pipeline they were per­form­ing main­te­nance work on.

Boodram, who, like his col­leagues, was se­ri­ous­ly in­jured, man­aged to make his way to the en­trance of the pipeline and was res­cued.

Boodram and his col­leagues on the sur­face sub­se­quent­ly claimed they were barred from at­tempt­ing to res­cue the oth­ers, who Boodram claimed were still alive and await­ing as­sis­tance.

Three of the divers’ bod­ies were re­cov­ered on Feb­ru­ary 28, while Na­gas­sar’s was re­cov­ered the fol­low­ing day.

Cab­i­net ini­tial­ly ap­point­ed a five-mem­ber team to in­ves­ti­gate the in­ci­dent but scrapped the plan due to pub­lic crit­i­cism, which led to the with­draw­al of for­mer T&T En­er­gy Cham­ber chair­man Eu­gene Tiah.

Ja­maican Queen’s Coun­sel Den­nis Mor­ri­son was ini­tial­ly ap­point­ed to chair the com­mis­sion along­side com­mis­sion­er and sub­sea spe­cial­ist Gre­go­ry Wil­son but was re­placed by Lynch af­ter he re­signed due to per­son­al rea­sons.

Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj, SC, Ron­nie Bisses­sar and Vi­jaya Ma­haraj were ap­point­ed as coun­sel to the com­mis­sion.

In Ju­ly, the com­mis­sion is­sued a no­tice seek­ing state­ments from mem­bers of the pub­lic rel­e­vant to its terms of ref­er­ence., which in­cludes mak­ing find­ings on whether there are any grounds for crim­i­nal pro­ceed­ings and mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions to pre­vent a re­cur­rence in the fu­ture.

The dead­line for sub­mis­sions was Au­gust 12.

Lawyers rep­re­sent­ing Boodram and the fam­i­lies of two of his de­ceased col­leagues wrote to the com­mis­sion re­quest­ing fund­ing for their le­gal teams and to ob­tain re­ports from in­de­pen­dent ex­perts for the com­mis­sion’s con­sid­er­a­tion. How­ev­er, they were told that they should seek le­gal aid through the Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, as such falls out­side the com­mis­sion’s re­mit.