Fisherfolk in Tobago are being urged to desist from catching and selling fish from areas affected by the recent oil spill.
Director of the Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA) Dr Ava Maxam made the plea during an interview with Newsday on February 13, following last Wednesday’s oil spill caused by an overturned boat about 200 metres off the coast of the Cove Eco Industrial Park.
The unmanned vessel, named Gulfstream, continues to leak an oily substance into the Atlantic ocean, one week after it seemingly drifted into Tobago's waters. A release from the Ministry of National Security on Wednesday said there were two vessels involved in the spill, a tugboat and the overturned barge. The release said the vessels were on route from Panama to Guyana. The vessels' owners have yet to be identified.
Thick oil has blackened the shorelines of several coastal villages, including Petit Trou beach, Lambeau, Lowlands, near the Magdalena Beach & Golf Resort and along the Scarborough waterfront, Milford Road.
Booms have been deployed to contain the spill and stop the oil from affecting operations at the Port of Scarborough, where cruise ships and the inter-island ferry arrive.
The IMA sent a team to Tobago on Saturday to conduct initial ecological assessments of mangroves, beaches and other areas affected by the spill.
As the Lenten season begins, the demand for fish spikes as many Christians refrain from meat as part of their fasting.
Maxam confirmed that the team has found dead animals, including fish, during site visits.
She said there is an agency that is assisting the Tobago Emergency Management Agency (TEMA) with the clean-up of some of these dead animals. She said though not a lot has been found, on the scale of things it is not an extensive die out that is being seen of animals, but there are some from die outs.
“Yes, but it’s not as much as we thought it would have been."
She said it is important that fishes in affected areas not be consumed.
"I even heard the THA sending out those alerts to the fisherfolk, not to be selling fish in those areas. These are toxic chemicals that can accumulate in animals and then they’re consumed by humans – they can in turn cause damage to humans, so we’re sending out that message.
"Please, anything that is caught in the area and harvested from the area for the sake of human consumption, try to avoid these until our assessments are complete and we feel like the habitats have gone back to normal levels.”
Meantime, the corals, she said, that are most affected are those that are found in shallow areas.
“This includes areas such a Kilgwyn Bay as coral and seagrass grow very close to the shores. You find in these kinds of high-wave environment; wind actions may disburse the oil. We know oil is toxic so those corals and marine life, the mangrove and so on...
"So ecologically, we’re trying to look at the damage to the marine flora and fauna but there are areas that we want to pay attention to because Petit Trou, for example, is already an area that we found was unde
