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Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Heritage: Oil spill cleanup continues

by

Radhica De Silva
1260 days ago
20210913
FLASHBACK: – Heritage Petroleum teams cleaning up an oil spill along the New Cut Channel in South Oropouche, in 2020.

FLASHBACK: – Heritage Petroleum teams cleaning up an oil spill along the New Cut Channel in South Oropouche, in 2020.

Rishi Ragoonath

Cleanup works are con­tin­u­ing at Point Lig­ore, Point Fortin as Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed tries to find the source of an oil spill that oc­curred last Sun­day.

The com­pa­ny blocked off ma­jor ac­cess roads on Mon­day as it con­tin­ued to re­move oil ac­cu­mu­la­tion which was re­port­ed along a mu­nic­i­pal drain that col­lects over­flow from many parts of Point Fortin. 

The source of the leak has not yet been iden­ti­fied al­though ef­forts have been on­go­ing and would con­tin­ue. Her­itage said it has de­ployed spe­cialised spill re­sponse teams to clean up the af­fect­ed area. 

“Most of the oil was con­tained via con­tain­ment booms at the area and clean-up ef­forts are on­go­ing. Air qual­i­ty test­ing was con­duct­ed at the site and all lev­els were with­in nor­mal lim­its. No in­juries or ad­verse im­pact to res­i­dents of the com­mu­ni­ty have been re­port­ed,” Her­itage said,

The com­pa­ny al­so said it is con­duct­ing on­go­ing sur­veil­lance to en­sure that the source is con­firmed and the spill is con­tained.

“ As a pre­cau­tion­ary mea­sure, a wildlife res­cue and re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion crew has been mo­bi­lized to pro­vide a spe­cial­ized re­sponse, should it be re­quired. Her­itage has no­ti­fied the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries and all oth­er reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies in­clud­ing the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA),” the com­pa­ny added.

In a sub­se­quent state­ment is­sued last night, Her­itage said in ad­di­tion to the on­go­ing sur­veil­lance, con­tain­ment, cleanup and re­me­di­a­tion work, the com­pa­ny has de­ployed ad­di­tion­al re­sources such as booms, ves­sels and man­pow­er at the site and risk as­sess­ments are on­go­ing.

The com­pa­ny ad­vised the pub­lic to com­ply with all di­rec­tion­al signs and in­struc­tions and uti­lize the al­ter­na­tive routes avail­able.

“Fail­ure to so do may jeop­ar­dise the time­li­ness of the clean-up ac­tiv­i­ties in ad­di­tion to in­tro­duc­ing risk to unau­tho­rized per­son­nel. The com­pa­ny con­tin­ues to work close­ly with the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties to en­sure that all op­er­a­tions are con­duct­ed in a safe, ef­fi­cient and time­ly man­ner as per com­pli­ance re­quire­ments.”

Her­itage said it will con­tin­ue to keep the pub­lic up­dat­ed on the cleanup ef­forts.

 

 


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