Farley: Tobagonians patience running thin with ferry

Stephon Nicholas

Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine said To­bag­o­ni­ans' pa­tience are "right­ful­ly run­ning out" as the dis­rup­tion to the car­go ser­vice is now a mat­ter of se­ri­ous con­cern. On Feb­ru­ary 2, Au­gus­tine ap­pealed to the pub­lic for "grace and pa­tience" amid the tran­si­tion from the Cabo Star to the MV Blue Wave Har­mo­ny.

How­ev­er, a se­ries of tech­ni­cal is­sues, un­for­tu­nate events and "over­am­bi­tious" plan­ning have left To­bag­o­ni­ans scram­bling for ba­sic items and dealt a blow to the tourism and con­struc­tion sec­tors.

Dur­ing a vir­tu­al me­dia con­fer­ence on Sun­day, Au­gus­tine apol­o­gised to his fel­low To­bag­o­ni­ans.

Au­gus­tine said he ex­pects the Port Au­thor­i­ty to stick to the March 1 dead­line for the first com­mer­cial sail­ing of the Blue Wave Har­mo­ny. How­ev­er, he not­ed he is un­aware of any con­tin­gency plan if an­oth­er is­sue de­lays the maid­en sail­ing.

Au­gus­tine has tasked a unit from the THA Di­vi­sion of Fi­nance to quan­ti­fy the loss­es suf­fered by the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty ow­ing to the dis­rup­tion. He said con­sid­er­a­tion will be giv­en to com­pen­sat­ing busi­ness own­ers for their loss­es. In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia on Feb­ru­ary 20, one hard­ware em­ploy­ee in To­ba­go said they have seen a $15,000 drop in sales dai­ly.

A me­dia state­ment from the TT Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce on Fri­day said there is tremen­dous pres­sure on the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty to main­tain cur­rent prices as their sup­plies dwin­dle and the de­mand for goods and ser­vices in­crease.