Oil from capsized vessel off Tobago makes it way back to Venezuela

Illicit oil shipped from Venezuela at the end of last month is making its way back home albeit in the form of a 170 km long slick.

On the morning of February 7, local authorities detected an oil slick spewing from a capsized vessel off the west coast of Tobago. The slick quickly hit the southwest shoreline of the Caribbean island with a national emergency declared and thousands of volunteers helping in the subsequent clean-up. 

After reviewing much material the coast guard on Wednesday was able to confirm the vessel was an unpowered fuel barge that was being towed to Guyana by a Tanzania-registered, 1976-built tug called Solo Creed. The name of the 48-year-old barge, according to Bellingcat, a Dutch data journalism organisation, is Gulfstream. The tug and barge are owned by Panamanian interests and have a history of moving Venezuelan oil with TankerTrackers.com able to confirm that the tug and barge loaded as much as 35,000 barrels of oil from Venezuela at the end of last month bound for Guyana before running into difficulty off Tobago. 

The whereabouts and ownership of the tug remain unknown, while oil continues to spill from the barge, and the slick is extending overseas, now some 170 km long and in Grenada’s territorial waters and likely to enter Venezuelan waters shortly despite extensive booms being put in place around the wreck. 

“We are unable to plug the leak and unless we have information on how much fuel is in the barge or what exactly it contains we cannot move forward, except containment and skimming,” Farley Augustine, the chief secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly told reporters yesterday.