Gov­ern­ment and all its rel­e­vant agen­cies would do well to close­ly mon­i­tor de­vel­op­ments with the float­ing stor­age tanker that has been list­ing for the past few days and could cause a mas­sive oil spill in the Gulf of Paria.

There needs to be more than pass­ing con­cern about the fate of the Nabari­ma, a Float­ing Stored Oil (FSO) tanker lo­cat­ed off the Venezue­lan coast of Guiria, be­cause it is hold­ing close to 1.3 mil­lion bar­rels of crude oil.

Should the worst hap­pen, Trinidad and To­ba­go will be fac­ing one of the biggest ma­rine dis­as­ters in its his­to­ry, which will im­pact lo­cal fish­eries and oth­er ac­tiv­i­ties all along that coast. Ac­cord­ing to a re­port in the New York Times on Tues­day, a po­ten­tial spill could dam­age frag­ile man­groves, fish­eries and bird sanc­tu­ar­ies.

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan re­vis­it­ed the is­sue again yes­ter­day, af­ter not­ing in­for­ma­tion ini­tial­ly re­ceived from his Venezue­lan coun­ter­parts on the sit­u­a­tion may not have been a full pic­ture of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. Min­is­ter Khan al­so stood ready to of­fer any as­sis­tance to rec­ti­fy the sit­u­a­tion if Venezuela seeks it.

Ques­tions are in­deed be­ing raised about the ca­pac­i­ty of state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA), which has been mired in cor­rup­tion and mis­man­age­ment for years, to prop­er­ly han­dle the sit­u­a­tion.

This po­ten­tial cri­sis is de­vel­op­ing in an area where pro­duc­tion op­er­a­tions have ceased. The Nabari­ma is in Venezuela’s Coro­coro field, which has been aban­doned for two years.

The sit­u­a­tion with the ves­sel on­ly be­came known be­cause of alarms raised by Eu­d­is Girot, head of the Uni­tary Fed­er­a­tion Pe­tro­le­um Work­ers of Venezuela (Fut­pve), who claims the Nabari­ma is in a very bad state as its equip­ment has com­plete­ly de­te­ri­o­rat­ed.

Pre­vent­ing an en­vi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter in­volves trans­fer­ring crude from the list­ing tanker to an­oth­er ves­sel. To fur­ther com­pli­cate mat­ters, cur­rent US sanc­tions against Venezuela means the nec­es­sary ex­per­tise and equip­ment might not be avail­able to PDVSA for the del­i­cate op­er­a­tion.

The en­vi­ron­men­tal and eco­nom­ic im­pli­ca­tions for T&T if the worst hap­pens are too dire to con­tem­plate in these un­cer­tain pan­dem­ic times

This coun­try and then state-owned oil com­pa­ny Petrotrin took some blows sev­en years ago when 11 oil spills rav­aged Trinidad's south­west­ern penin­su­la. An­oth­er ma­jor oil spill near the coun­try’s most pop­u­lous and ac­tive coast has im­pli­ca­tions for the liveli­hoods of many cit­i­zens.

At its health­i­est, the Gulf’s nu­tri­ent-rich wa­ters sup­port abun­dant and di­verse fish­eries. The man­groves and wet­lands there nur­ture an ar­ray of ma­rine life.

How­ev­er, there is al­ways a bal­anc­ing act that must be main­tained be­tween that nat­ur­al di­ver­si­ty and the in­dus­tri­al ac­tiv­i­ty con­cen­trat­ed along that coast­line, in­clud­ing ma­jor oil fa­cil­i­ties, ship­ping and dry­dock­ing op­er­a­tions.

To fur­ther un­der­score the im­por­tance of the Gulf of Paria to this coun­try, con­sid­er the fact that more than 2,500 fish­er­folk op­er­ate in com­mu­ni­ties there and it is in the vicin­i­ty of that coast that more than 90 per cent of Trinidad’s pop­u­la­tion re­sides.

With so much to lose, this loom­ing en­vi­ron­men­tal threat must be tak­en very se­ri­ous­ly.