Am­bi­ka Ja­gas­sars­ingh

Land and Ma­rine Con­tract­ing Ser­vices Ltd (LM­CS) Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor, Kaz­im Ali Snr (LM­CS) is stand­ing by his state­ment that had Paria act­ed with­in the hour of five work­ers be­ing sucked in­to Sealine 36 on Feb­ru­ary 25 2022, it would have been crit­i­cal to their sur­vival he said. 
With the com­mence­ment of the sec­ond week of ev­i­den­tiary hear­ings in­to the Paria Com­mis­sion of En­quiry, Ali Snr said he spoke to Paria’s Ter­mi­nal Man­ag­er Collin Piper and said the men were alive in the pipe pri­or to Christo­pher Boodram es­cap­ing. 

Ac­cord­ing to Ali Snr’s state­ment in the 22.12.02-Sup­ple­men­tal-Wit­ness-State­ment-Bun­dle on the CoE’s web­site, “We got the mes­sage that LM­CS’ work­ers were hear­ing nois­es in the cham­ber...while I was at the off­shore docks, I was in­formed by Dex­ter that there were re­ports of knock­ing at Berth 5.” 

In the hear­ing to­day, and speak­ing from his ex­pe­ri­ence in the field, Ali Snr added that based on his own as­sump­tions, the oil pushed out from Sealine 36 in­to 66 and then fur­ther in­to a tank ashore, would have filled the pipe tak­ing away the risk of there be­ing a dif­fer­en­tial pres­sure in Sealine 36. 

Through­out the en­quiry, there were some dis­crep­an­cies and con­fu­sion re­gard­ing the ter­mi­nol­o­gy and un­der­stand­ing of the op­er­a­tions of the pipelines and the man­ner in which oil is dis­placed by air pump­ing and blow­ing be­tween the lines.  
Along with this con­fu­sion of the pipeline op­er­a­tions, the equip­ment be­ing used to show the court, lawyers and oth­er mem­bers of the hear­ing the core bun­dles and state­ments, were dys­func­tion­al which fur­ther de­layed the pro­gres­sion of the hear­ing. 

In light of this, the Com­mis­sion’s chair­man, King's Coun­sel Jerome Lynch en­cour­aged Ali Snr to fur­ther ex­pound on the de­scrip­tion of the lines, to fa­cil­i­tate a deep­er un­der­stand­ing. 

Ali Snr took to the draw­ing board to de­pict the work­ings of the air be­ing bled out of the line to change the pres­sure lev­el with­in the pipeline.  

When ques­tioned by Se­nior Coun­sel Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj, about whether or not he had mea­sured the quan­ti­ty of oil which had been dis­placed, which may have been ef­fec­tive in know­ing whether a dif­fer­en­tial pres­sure had been formed, Ali Snr replied, “Our mea­sure­ment was what was left in the ris­er.” 
Ma­haraj went fur­ther to ask if Ali Snr and LM­CS had the fore­sight to take the pres­sure from Berth 6 to de­ter­mine the sta­tus of Delta P, to which he fi­nalised with, “I did not.” 
At the be­gin­ning of the hear­ing, Lynch stat­ed that two new doc­u­ments had been dis­closed in the Paria Com­mis­sion of En­quiry, mere hours be­fore the ev­i­den­tiary hear­ing was set to be­gin to­day. 
Ac­cord­ing to Lynch a se­ries of emails be­tween Kaz­im Ali and Paria’s HSEQ Lead, Ran­dolph Arch­bald as well as new chart di­a­grams show­ing lines 5 and 6. 

Lynch ques­tioned why these doc­u­ments were not pre­sent­ed be­fore with ac­com­pa­ny­ing state­ments de­clar­ing and ex­plain­ing the ex­tra ev­i­dence be­ing pre­sent­ed. 

The chair­man said these di­a­grams showed that the line had a kink and was not straight as was pre­vi­ous­ly be­lieved. He said this ev­i­dence was in­for­ma­tion that need­ed time to be in­gest­ed so that the com­mis­sion would have a prop­er un­der­stand­ing of the sit­u­a­tion. 
On Feb­ru­ary 25, Fyzal Kur­ban, Kaz­im Ali Jr, the son of Ali Snr, Yusuf Hen­ry, Rishi Na­gas­sar and Christo­pher Boodram were en­gaged in sub­sea re­pairs on Paria’s 30-inch di­am­e­ter Sealine 36 pipeline. 
It is be­lieved a Dif­fer­en­tial Pres­sure (Delta P) in­ci­dent oc­curred, which led to the death of Kur­ban, Ali, Hen­ry and Na­gas­sar. Boodram is the on­ly sur­vivor and eye­wit­ness. 

Kaz­im Ali giv­ing ev­i­dence at the COE