The MV Barima tragedy has exposed a terrible reality in Guyana: the country does not possess a credible national search-and-rescue capability. For travellers to Guyana’s hinterland, be they residents, from the labour and tourism sectors, that conclusion should make the body run cold.
According to initial reports, following the capsizing of the MV Barima, hours had elapsed before the first rescue vessels reached the scene, rescuing sixty-seven survivors who were still adrift on the turbulent waves of the Atlantic Ocean while others remained trapped presumably within and beneath the vessel. Citizens from the Pomeroon River were the first responders. The obvious question is not why community members responded. They always do. The more troubling question is why they remain the country’s first responders whenever disaster strikes.
For decades, Guyana has relied upon fishermen, boat operators, villagers and volunteers to perform functions that, in most countries, belong to a permanent emergency service. Communities deserve credit for their courage, but courage is not a substitute for public policy. Citizens’ activism has been complementary to the State’s response—it was not intended to replace it. And here are two interesting facts: the Leader of the Opposition assembled a team and with his own resources outperformed the State with its trillion dollar plus supplementary billion package budgets while performing search and rescue operations in the Atlantic Ocean. He even recovered more victims of the tragedy than the State funded Coast Guard. Secondly, recent news again demonstrated the contradictions of the State when the MV Barima emergency beckoned – a civic- minded citizen was arrested and his boat detained for performing national service when he transported a MV Barima victim retrieved by Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed and team from the Atlantic Ocean to Charity.
Using the Pomeroon River and the Atlantic Ocean as a reference marker illustrates the problem with painful clarity. Every day hundreds of passengers travel between the Moruca sub region and Charity, while numerous other vessels navigate the surrounding waterways linking communities internally within the Pomeroon River and as far as Port Kaituma, Shell Beach and neighbouring Venezuela. This therefore is one of Guyana’s busiest maritime corridors. Yet no permanent search-and-rescue base exists along that route. Is it to be assumed that the State has knowingly accepted the movement of hundreds of citizens each day without providing an emergency response capability proportionate to the risks they face? And is this a policy choice?
The MV Barima Tragedy demonstrates what that choice means in practice. Had a properly equipped maritime rescue unit been stationed near the Pomeroon estuary, a rescue vessel could conceivably have reached the distressed ferry in less than half an hour rather than the hours that it eventually took. Whether every life could have been saved is impossible to know. What can be said is that in this specific emergency the response would have been measured in minutes, not in hours. On that fateful last Saturday night every minute lost narrowed the possibility of rescue. But this weakness is not confined to maritime emergencies.
Earlier this year, following the Air Services Limited Cessna Grand Caravan accident, in the Upper Mazaruni, it reportedly took three days before troops were inserted into the crash site. By then, the operation had effectively shifted from rescue to recovery. Different incident. Different geography. The same institutional failure. Patterns matter. While it is acceptable that a single delayed response may be explained by circumstances, recurring delays across both maritime and aviation emergencies point to something larger: this government has consistently refused to build an integrated national search-and-rescue system capable of responding rapidly across its rivers, forests, coastline and interior.
This is particularly difficult to reconcile with Guyana’s economic transformation. The country now commands financial resources unimaginable a decade ago. And the government often boasts of the size of its annual budgets and the number of infrastructure projects announced. But its most glaring failure has been its inability to preserve life when disaster strikes.
Search and rescue is not a luxury reserved for wealthy nations. It is a core responsibility of any government that asks its citizens to travel by river, sea or air. And with the oft mentioned tourism sector, has the government considered the signals it is sending to foreign potential clients about its steadfast refusal to act on a national search and rescue policy and capability? This requires permanent bases, specialised vessels, trained personnel, interoperable communications, aviation support and modern technologies capable of locating survivors quickly. It is an investment whose value is realised only on the worst day imaginable.
Technology should also become part of that capability. The continued absence of publicly reported use of aerial or submersible drones during the MV Barima operation suggests that the government has not fully grasped its responsibility. Drones, when properly deployed, its systems can rapidly access and assess accident sites, support rescue planning, some platforms are designed to deliver emergency food and medical aid packages and provide real-time intelligence to responders. Quixotically, the arrest and detention of APNU MP Sherod Duncan by the Guyana Police Force in Charity for operating a drone system for information gathering purposes only sent a signal of backwardness by the authorities.
The absence of a dedicated search and rescue capability in the MV Barima Tragedy should therefore mark a turning point. It is imperative that Guyana emerge from this catastrophe with a permanent national search-and-rescue authority, strategically positioned along its major rivers, coastline and hinterland aviation and land corridors, equipped to respond immediately rather than eventually. Its measure should demonstrate how serious the government is prepared to save lives it still can rather than having to defend the preventable loss of lives against class action litigation.
Discussion