Port Health office opens to ease marine operations

The ma­rine sec­tor has se­cured a long-pushed op­er­a­tional fix in Ch­aguara­mas, with the open­ing of a ded­i­cat­ed Port Health Of­fice at CrewsInn, a move stake­hold­ers say will cut red tape and tight­en over­sight at one of the coun­try’s busiest yacht­ing hubs.

The fa­cil­i­ty opened on April 29 with a rib­bon-cut­ting cer­e­mo­ny, end­ing a years-long push by the Ma­rine Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (MSATT) to es­tab­lish a per­ma­nent Port Health pres­ence in the north-west penin­su­la.

That push in­ten­si­fied dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, when health clear­ance be­came manda­to­ry for both cruis­ers and lo­cal ves­sels. Op­er­a­tors re­lied on re­mote de­c­la­ra­tions and cer­tifi­cates, a sys­tem they said cre­at­ed de­lays and in­ef­fi­cien­cies.

MSATT ar­gued that a phys­i­cal of­fice was es­sen­tial not on­ly for pub­lic health com­pli­ance, but al­so for the smooth func­tion­ing of the ma­rine and yacht­ing sec­tor, which sup­ports tourism in­flows and a net­work of an­cil­lary ser­vices in Ch­aguara­mas.

The new fa­cil­i­ty now al­lows Port Health of­fi­cers to con­duct in­spec­tions, process clear­ances and en­force pro­to­cols in re­al time, re­duc­ing wait­ing times for ves­sels en­ter­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go wa­ters and im­prov­ing co­or­di­na­tion be­tween agen­cies.

The de­vel­op­ment comes as Gov­ern­ment push­es broad­er re­forms in the mar­itime sec­tor, in­clud­ing the live test­ing of the Sail Clear sys­tem in Ch­aguara­mas. The elec­tron­ic plat­form al­lows yacht op­er­a­tors to sub­mit Cus­toms de­c­la­ra­tions be­fore ar­rival, re­plac­ing man­u­al pa­per­work and cut­ting pro­cess­ing time from sev­er­al hours to min­utes.