Oil­field Work­ers Trade Union (OW­TU) pres­i­dent An­cel Ro­get is claim­ing that Paria’s pri­or­i­ty is cov­er­ing up the in­ci­dent in­volv­ing five un­der­wa­ter divers who were sucked in­to a pipe in the Gulf of Paria on Fri­day. He said that had be­come the main fo­cus in­stead of res­cu­ing the divers.

Four of the five divers re­mained trapped up to late yes­ter­day. The div­er who was res­cued re­mained hos­pi­talised.

In a live stream from the com­pa­ny’s main ad­min­is­tra­tion build­ing in Pointe-a-Pierre, Ro­get said the com­pa­ny has re­fused to al­low the union to give ex­pert ad­vice to en­sure the divers are found.

"From yes­ter­day to to­day, over some 30 hours, there con­tin­ue to be a num­ber of bunglings while every pre­cious minute counts. While every pre­cious minute that goes by the chances of res­cu­ing those work­ers be­come slim­mer and slim­mer, those per­sons in Paria to­day are now more con­cerned with cov­er­ing up in­for­ma­tion and cov­er­ing their tracks rather than en­sur­ing that cor­rect ex­per­tise is in place."

"How heart­less can these peo­ple get?" he asked, adding that the trau­ma­tised fam­i­lies need to be in­formed about ex­act­ly what is hap­pen­ing.

Ro­get said no ef­fort should be spared by the man­age­ment to en­sure they em­ploy the lev­el of ex­per­tise to res­cue those work­ers.

Claim­ing that there was no emer­gency re­sponse ap­pa­ra­tus when the in­ci­dent oc­curred, he said, “We de­mand trans­paren­cy, we de­mand open­ness, we de­mand to know ex­act­ly what is hap­pen­ing with the op­er­a­tions so that we could be as­sured and to con­vey that to the fam­i­ly,” he added.