Heritage’s diving operations supervisor, Rolph Seales, says he was not told that four men were trapped in a Paria pipeline until hours after he arrived at the scene of the accident on February 25.
Seales, a Kenson employee contracted by Heritage Petroleum Limited, was giving evidence before the Commission of Enquiry set up to investigate the deadly accident.
Heritage is the sister company of Paria Fuel Trading Company Limited and Seales was instructed to report to Paria after the accident.
Seales said with all that he knows now, he estimates the four men, Fyzal Kurban, Rishi Nagassar, Yusuf Henry and Kazim Ali Junior, could have been alive up to five hours after the accident.
However, Seales said with the identification of Delta P as the cause of the accident, the five-hour window could have been even less.
“The fact that you could have applied survivability was Mr Boodram supposedly coming out of the pipe,” Seales said.
He was asked by the Commission’s chairman, King’s Counsel Jerome Lynch whether he had been told that Boodram had come out of the pipe when he arrived at Paria that night.
“No… until later on that night into the wee hours of Saturday morning, that’s when I got that information,” Seales said.
He said he was also told that Boodram had said there were air pockets in the pipeline at the same time.
However, Seales said his role on the site was to coordinate the various dive crews who had been called out to assist in the rescue.
He said he was never asked to prepare a rescue plan for the men. Seales said he was also never asked to prepare a risk assessment for rescuing the men.
But his statements were strongly challenged by Paria’s attorney, Gilbert Peterson, who said it was neither true nor fair to Paria for Seales to say that.
Peterson said it was the evidence of Heritage’s operations HSSE manager, Osei Flemming-Holder, Seales had been properly briefed about the incident on his arrival at Paria around 9 pm.
Flemming-Holder also gave evidence yesterday. During his evidence, he said several times he told Seales to prepare a risk assessment for the rescue.
He said he sat down with Seales shortly after 9 pm and the two started to prepare a risk assessment. He said he typed on his laptop and the two worked on the plan for about 40 minutes.
Flemming-Holder said by 11 pm, he had seen two independent videos showing an air tank blocking the inside of the pipeline.
Flemming-Holder said he estimated the men could have remained alive in the pipeline for about six hours.
He said a crawler was sent into the line to try to push the tank out of the way but that was unsuccessful.
Although he was asked several times about the attempts to rescue the men, Flemming-Holder maintained he would not do it unless it was safe and there was a guarantee that the rescuer would come out alive.
