By Sue-Ann Wayow
MICHAEL Kurban, the son of Fyzal Kurban who died in the tragic accident at Berth #6 belonging to the Paria Fuel Trading Company, said he was stopped from rescuing his father on that fateful day on February 25, 2022.
He took the witness box on Thursday as the Commission of Enquiry (CoE) continued at the Waterfront in Port of Spain.
Kurban, a marine captain and commercial diver also employed by LMCS – the same company as his father, was offered condolences by CoE’s chairman Jerome Lynch, KC.
At the beginning of his session Lynch said, “Mr Kurban, everybody here know you lost your father, and you will be treated with courtesy and respect. I will make sure of that.”
He also said he understood that it will not be easy for him and that Kurban must have lived with that incident ever since.
Lynch had expressed similar sentiments to the first witness in the evidential hearings Christopher Boodram as well as Kazim Ali Sr who gave his evidence earlier this week.
At the end of Kurban’s testimony, Lynch thanked him for his time.
He said, “I want you to know certainly everybody over here and I imagine everybody over there deeply feel your loss, I am very sorry about it indeed. We will get to the bottom of this, I can assure you.”
Kurban said when the divers went missing he had insisted there was enough time for his father and his three colleagues to be saved from the time they were sucked into the pipeline on February 25.
Kurban was one of the divers who assisted with getting Boodram out of the pipe by diving into the hyperbaric chamber.
Boodram had indicated then that from his knowledge, Fyzal Kurban was right behind him in the pipe.
However, when he attempted to rescue his father, Kurban claimed he was stopped.
“The second attempt was to go in the pipeline because when we rescued Christopher…” he told Paria’s counsel Gilbert Peterson, SC.
Kurban, one out of five LMCS’s employees willing to go into the pipe, would have been assisted by two others, he said.
After Boodram’s rescue, a plan was formulated to do another dive which was aborted.
Kurban said he made that call after checking the PSI on the tank and the estimation of time and depth to venture into the pipeline, “it wasn’t enough air.”
“There wasn’t enough air in the tank that we had,” he further clarified for Peterson.
The men were awaiting other equipment to arrive at the location.
A plan was made on the barge in the presence of members of the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard who said they were not trained to dive into pipes, Kurban said.
In Kurban’s witness statement which Peterson pointed out, he said a person from Paria was also relaying the message to Kurban that he could not go into the pipe. He also told Kurban, “what you want to do.”
Kurban at the time was in the water when the conversation took place.
He said, “He did not stop me. I asked him who is telling you to stop me and he said it was Piper, so I told him men’s lives were at risk, why Piper telling us not to go in the pipe.”
Earlier on Thursday, LMCS supervisor Dexter Guerra told the Commission that his instruction to not venture into the pipeline came via a telephone call from Paria’s Terminal Manager Collin Piper.
Andrew Farrah, Conan Beddoe and Ronald Ramoutar were also interviewed on Thursday.
The CoE resumes next week.
