Several persons rescued as search continues after boat capsizes in Guyana

Pre­lim­i­nary re­ports in­di­cate that a huge wave may have caused the MV Bari­ma with 116 pas­sen­gers and a 17-mem­ber crew to cap­size on Sat­ur­day night as it made its way to Port Kai­tu­ma, a small vil­lage with­in the Bari­ma-Wai­ni ad­min­is­tra­tive re­gion of Guyana, Pub­lic Works Min­is­ter Juan Edghill has said.

So far 67 per­sons have been res­cued and Edghill re­mains hope­ful that “we’ll be able to ac­count for all that were on board – 116 pas­sen­gers and 17 crew”.

Edghill, speak­ing with the chil­dren of Richard Moe Se­nior, one of the crew mem­bers, said “from what we hear, it’s a big wave. That’s all we hear. It’s from every­body who hears it. But, there will be a full in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to what hap­pened. I don’t want to pres­sure you to in­ves­ti­gate it. I sim­ply want to ex­plain it,” Edghill told the chil­dren.

“We want­ed to be cer­tain that it wasn’t hit by any for­eign ob­ject. Or it didn’t hit any­thing. We want­ed to es­tab­lish that. Every­body said it was so-so, and I must tell you, even in the com­mu­ni­ca­tion, be­cause there were al­ready the phone sig­nals have been break­ing up, so I don’t even want to hold peo­ple to what we may have heard,” he added.

“So, your fa­ther … let’s hope and pray that he’s com­ing in soon. We pray for that. We pray for all the oth­er crew mem­bers. Every­body. Every­body. We want every­body to be here,” Ed­hgill said.

Clar­i­fy­ing what he de­scribed as mis­in­for­ma­tion re­gard­ing the cause of the in­ci­dent, the min­is­ter said: “There was no en­gine prob­lem or any me­chan­i­cal prob­lem. Even the sur­vivors who made videos from the hos­pi­tal, they’re telling you what hap­pened, and it had noth­ing to do with over­load, or tak­ing in wa­ter.

“It had to do with the tide. Please be ad­vised that the MV Bari­ma is li­censed to car­ry 284 tonnes of car­go. The car­go man­i­fest shows that we had 268 tonnes, way be­low the car­go load.

“Sec­ond­ly, the MV Bari­ma is li­censed to car­ry 397 pas­sen­gers and we on­ly had 116 pas­sen­gers on board. The mis­in­for­ma­tion of over­load­ing as the cause of this in­ci­dent must be dealt with for what it is. Mis­in­for­ma­tion and some­thing to cre­ate pan­ic and pub­lic mis­chief and we de­ny that in the very strongest terms,” Edghill added.

Ear­li­er, Edghill told a news con­fer­ence, it’s still too ear­ly for us to be de­fin­i­tive about a num­ber of things, in­clud­ing the names of those al­ready res­cued.

But he said that Health Min­is­ter Dr. Frank An­tho­ny is lead­ing a mas­sive health re­sponse in both Re­gions two and three and that med­ical per­son­nel were on stand­by to treat and to deal with all on ar­rival.

The De­part­ment of Pub­lic In­for­ma­tion (DPI) said “the search and res­cue op­er­a­tion fol­low­ing the cap­siz­ing of the MV Bari­ma has made sig­nif­i­cant progress, with 67 peo­ple, in­clud­ing 15 chil­dren, res­cued as re­cov­ery teams ad­vanced their search”.