To­ba­go can now ex­hale, as the barge re­spon­si­ble for the Feb­ru­ary 7 oil spill that af­fect­ed 15 kilo­me­tres of shore­line has been re­float­ed and towed to Trinidad. The over­turned Gulf­stream barge, which has been ground­ed off Cove, start­ed its jour­ney to Trinidad some­time yes­ter­day morn­ing.

By the time Guardian Me­dia checked its last lo­ca­tion around mid­day, it was nowhere in sight. To­ba­go Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency di­rec­tor Al­lan Stew­art con­firmed the ves­sel had left the is­land’s shores.

The voy­age from Cove to Port-of-Spain was ex­pect­ed to take about 33 hours. Af­ter be­ing re­float­ed yes­ter­day, the barge was three nau­ti­cal miles from its orig­i­nal lo­ca­tion and be­ing sup­port­ed by tugs.

While this is a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone, it is far from over for To­ba­go, Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine said.

“This is what we have been work­ing to­wards for months be­cause we don’t re­al­ly want to keep scrap iron and old boats in our reefs,” Au­gus­tine not­ed.

Now, the is­land is left to sort out the waste tem­porar­i­ly stored at the Stud­ley Park dump and nurse the ecosys­tem back to health.

“It was a dif­fi­cult task to get to that point. The sur­face cur­rent where the ves­sel was lodged is ex­treme­ly high; it was ex­treme­ly dan­ger­ous and dif­fi­cult. But we worked with the En­er­gy Min­istry and Coast Guard, De­part­ment of Fish­eries, and lo­cal divers and T&T Sal­vage.”

He lament­ed, “In terms of light at the end of the tun­nel, it has not changed any­thing re­al­ly. We still have enor­mous bills to be set­tled from the en­tire op­er­a­tion. We have a long-last­ing im­pact on the en­vi­ron­ment that we are now study­ing, and it will cost us quite a bit of mon­ey. But slow­ly but sure­ly, we are get­ting there.”

The To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly sought $153 mil­lion in the mid-year bud­get to deal with debts in­curred from the dis­as­ter. How­ev­er, it was al­lo­cat­ed $50 mil­lion.

Mean­while, for TEMA, this is the light at the end of the tun­nel.

Stew­art told Guardian Me­dia, “We wish the jour­ney to Trinidad to be a safe one, and that there are no in­ci­dents and every­thing works smooth­ly.”

But it was a bit­ter-sweet mo­ment for spe­cial­i­ty div­er Alvin Dou­glas. Dou­glas was a first re­spon­der who led an emer­gency op­er­a­tion to con­firm if there was life in the wreck­age.

“We will be able to go back to our pre­mier dive sites. Right now, as it stands, there are around a dozen dive sites we can’t go to be­cause the wreck is there.”

He es­ti­mates half a mil­lion dol­lars in loss­es to the sec­tor.

The tem­po­rary fa­cil­i­ty at Cove has been de­com­mis­sioned by the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries. Some­time yes­ter­day, a dive team con­duct­ed an un­der­wa­ter sur­vey to as­sess and clear any de­bris that could af­fect the tow­ing op­er­a­tion. When this sur­vey was done, the barge was cleared for its tran­sit to Trinidad.