CDC monitoring sinking oil vessel off Venezuela

Guyana’s Civil Defence Commission (CDC) with support from the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Authority (CDEMA) is closely monitoring the sinking of an oil tanker off of the Venezuelan coast. The 15-year-old tanker named Nabarima, is a Floating Storage and Offloading (FSO) vessel that is permanently moored offshore of Venezuela at the Corocoro oil field in the Gulf of Paria, located between Venezuela and the island of Trinidad. After production at Corocoro ceased in 2019 following United States sanctions on the Venezuelan state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), Nabarima fell into a state of disrepair. But the unfavourable fate does not stop there, as it was recently reported that FSO Nabarima, which currently holds 1.3 million barrels of oil, is currently sinking in the Gulf of Paria. The potential spill threatens not only the Gulf, but the entire Caribbean Sea as it can impact the ecological systems of Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago almost immediately, with the impact affecting other countries within the hemisphere over the medium to long term.

An oil spill from Nabarima would be five times larger than that of the Exxon Valdez that occurred in Alaska’s Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989. It was the worst oil spill in the hemisphere, until the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. The Exxon Valdez spilled 260,000 barrels (11M gallons) of oil into the Sound, with an oil slick that covered 1,300 miles of coastline and killed hundreds of thousands of seabirds, otters, seals and whales. Nearly 30 years later, pockets of crude oil remain in some locations.

(Kaieteur News)