Us­ing satel­lite da­ta, the To­ba­go Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency (TEMA) has de­tect­ed pos­si­ble oil reach­ing north­west and west of To­ba­go, orig­i­nat­ing from the over­turned ves­sel south of Cove.

TEMA said the satel­lite da­ta, cap­tured on Sun­day, Feb­ru­ary 12, 2024, re­vealed “a sil­ver-like slick em­a­nat­ing from the wrecked ves­sel, ac­com­pa­nied by streaks of a thick, black-like sub­stance.”

The Agency con­tin­ued, “The anom­aly mea­sured 48 nau­ti­cal miles (ap­prox­i­mate­ly 88 kilo­me­tres) in length and 0.13 nau­ti­cal miles (ap­prox­i­mate­ly 248 me­tres) in width. The spill ex­tends from the west to the north­west in­to the Caribbean Sea, with no­tice­able oil weath­er­ing be­gin­ning around 9.71 nau­ti­cal miles (ap­prox­i­mate­ly 18 kilo­me­tres) from the source.”

Over the last few days, and at the time of the satel­lite da­ta, winds mea­sured 16 knots from the east, guid­ing the po­ten­tial drift path of the oil slick. TEMA said the high con­fi­dence lev­el is at­trib­uted to the known sus­pect­ed point source. Vari­a­tions in slick thick­ness were not­ed, and a thin oil-like sub­stance was present in the im­agery. TEMA al­so con­duct­ed drone sur­veil­lance and ground truthing to in­crease the con­fi­dence lev­el.

There have been no in­di­ca­tions of oil en­ter­ing the west­ern or north­ern coasts of To­ba­go, and Grena­da’s dis­as­ter man­age­ment agency said the spill does not threat­en their coast­lines based on the lat­est da­ta.

The cap­sized ves­sel named “Gulf­stream,” was dis­cov­ered on Feb­ru­ary 7 with a thick oil-like sub­stance cov­er­ing sev­er­al kilo­me­tres of To­ba­go’s wind­ward coasts. To date, the leak has not been plugged and the own­er of the ship has not been iden­ti­fied.