THE MISSING LINK An investigation by Mark Meredith TRINIDAD EXPRESS    

   Silt pours off the hills below Tobago’s link road project over coral reefs. Photo: Mark Meredith    A quarter of all known marine species make their homes in coral reefs, though reefs cover only 0.02 per cent of the ocean floor.

According to investigations by the Sunday Express, a major road project linking L'Anse Fourmi to Charlotteville, funded by the Tobago House of Assembly (THA), is well underway without an application for a Certificate of Environmental Clearance (CEC); without the knowledge of top Environmental Management Authority (EMA) officials; without environmental mitigation measures; and without using an expensive environmental management plan they commissioned.

The massive earth-cutting project passes along mountainsides overlooking fragile coral reefs.

Photographic evidence obtained by the Sunday Express graphically illustrates the widespread destruction of mountainside and award-winning forest.

According to divers and those who have walked the new road, the siltation from the THA's road has already "annihilated" one of Tobago's well-known, Tidco-featured dive sites, The Brothers, and threatens havoc along miles of other reefs.

Tobago's Main Ridge Forest Reserve may be the World's No.1 eco-destination, but forests are not what the majority of Tobago's eco-tourists come to experience. Their world lies underwater, gliding through inner space among the coral reefs that have made Tobago a famous and favoured destination for the worldwide diving fraternity. The reefs have spawned hundreds, possibly thousands, of related local jobs.

But many of those reefs are facing a crisis brought about, ironically, by the logging and clearing of the very vegetation that won Tobago its award in the first place. In some cases it is already too late, and it could soon get very much worse.

For years, plumes of silt brought on by rain, carried by rivers and streams, have washed into the sea and over coral reefs because of uncontrolled logging in the Speyside, Charlotteville and Cambleton areas of northern Tobago, says the NGO Environment Tobago (ET).

The heavy equipment used in these exercises has created new channels for run-off, altering the drainage patterns in these watershed areas.

And, for years, ET says they have been warning the THA about the logging and of the consequences to the reefs. A moratorium on logging in 2000 after pressure from voluntary game wardens hasn't stopped it. Damage has been extensive with "enormous stress in north-east Tobago", ET president Pat Turpin told me.

"Top soil washing into the sea has been covering the reefs in the north, from Speyside around the north of the island and going down the coast as far as Culloden. Despite the moratorium, logging continues at an unprecedented rate," she added.

I spoke to a number of divers and dive operators. Ron Tial, of Ron's Watersports in Charlotteville, has been diving in Tobago since 1989. He is extremely concerned at the rapidly accelerating damage to the island's reef systems. He loves them, having completed over 10,000 dives. He cited silt pollution, nutrient pollution and the uncontrolled anchoring of yachts above reefs, which break off chunks of living coral, as the threats to reef systems.

Pirates Bay was suffering especially, he said. He is trying to raise money with local fishermen, who are seeing a declining catch, to mark the reef there with "no parking" buoys.

But it's the silt that's really unsettling him. He said siltation caused by logging has already destroyed the reef between the Charlotteville jetty and Pirates Bay.

"In the south-west of Charlotteville (Cambleton Hermatige) area you can look down and see a great muddy plume. It's got significantly worse in the last few years," according to Tial.

He explained that rain and currents take the silted water down towards the south of the island, smothering the delicate corals in a deathly coating. Groundswells also stir up the settled silt.

There has been a marked deterioration in the quality of reefs of both hard and soft corals, he said. Tial told me the effect is especially marked at the once popular The Brothers dive site, which is suffering from the run-off being generated by the THA's north coast road which passes right by. The Brothers and much of that north side were being washed by the silt, hard and soft corals smothered, he told me.

Another diver lamented how that area had once been one of Tobago's best dive sites, but it was "annihilated" as far as he was concerned.

Tial agreed that now there was very little to see at The Brothers; maybe the odd lonely grouper. "We're losing the health of our reefs very quickly," he warned.

Even at The Sisters, an advanced dive site in deep water approximately three km out from The Brothers, the effects of run-off were being felt, said Tial. Last Carnival he took customers to The Sisters when the water should have been at its clearest, but visibility was only ten to 20 feet, he told me.

This may have been due to the groundswell stirring up tonnes of settled sediment. It could also have been because of the Orinoco discharge which was sending out more freshwater than ever because of deforestation on the continent.

Apart from The Sisters, dive operators like Tial, Andrew Lovell at Grafton Beach Resort, and Derek Chung at Coco Reef no longer take divers anywhere along the stretch of Tobago's coast above Englishman's Bay to Charlotteville-the same stretch that happens to run parallel to the THA's road improvement project.

Lovell and Chung both agreed there was marked deterioration of Tobago's corals in recent years, referring to nutrient pollution and algae at Mt Irvine and further south, and siltation from the north. Their popular sites are the St Giles Islands, Speyside, Englishman's Bay and Castara.

I asked them if mitigation measures were not put in place on the road, and logging in the north and elsewhere not arrested, would not the continued run-off wash south past Englishman's Bay, eventually smothering and destroying all the fringing reefs along that coastline. Only a matter of time, I was told.

Owen Day, a director of the Buccoo Reef Trust, told me siltation was the second biggest killer of coral reefs in the Caribbean, after nutrient pollution. Coral polyps, he explained, needed sunlight to survive. Siltation smothers the polyps, depriving them of oxygen, starving them to death.

Some corals can survive if the silt is washed away, he said. Some corals ingest a mucus that enables them to clean themselves of sand and silt. But if

the silt overtakes the rate at which they are able to clean themselves they will die, exhausted by cleaning instead of growing.

Day told me that during massive earthworks in the construction of the sports stadium at Bacolet, a vast plume of silt flooded into Minister Bay. The corals in the area, including those around Bacolet Point, are now all dead.

Impacts from the THA's road construction, developments with run-off at Castara, the continued logging in the north, all of these had to be dealt with with the utmost seriousness, as a matter of urgency, he emphasised.

Environment Tobago and others who have walked the THA's road linking L'Anse Fourmi and Charlotteville are horrified at what they've found.

ET president Pat Turpin has been monitoring its progress. This is the third attempt to construct the road, she said.

"Work started on the current road after the budget was read in October 2002. It was supposed to take one year. It started in the rainy season and no mitigating measures had been put in place until February this year. At present, water catchments are being erected on the insides of the road to deal with run-off. In the interim, ET personnel have made numerous trips to the area to monitor the environmental damage reports," she told me.

"We have over the time-span found no mitigating measures whatsoever put in place, and little or no monitoring by the Department of Natural Resources and Environment. Excavated material has been bulldozed into the gullies, down river courses and piled high on the seaside of the road. Trees have been uprooted and tossed down in gullies. Hillsides have been cut down to crush rock for gravelling the surface of the road."

She added that there was a now a quarry on the L'Anse Fourmi side of the road with crushing and grading equipment. "It is our opinion that there is a serious lack of monitoring and management of the environment by the relevant authorities. This road project is contributing extensive damage to both the terrestrial and marine environment of north east Tobago. Deforestation due to logging and mismanagement is the first and ongoing contributor to the problem," she said.

I visited the EMA to look for the CEC for the THA's road in the CEC register. I was sure there must be one as the road construction taking place had been ongoing since late 2002, a year and a half after the CEC rules became law. But there was nothing to be found. The librarian had never heard of the road, nor senior officials I spoke to, including EMA chairman John Agard. They were surprised at the news.

Ray Sandy could be described as Tobago's environmental CEO: Director of Forestry and of Natural Resources and the Environment. He is also a board member of the Environmental Management Authority (EMA), Tobago's

special representative there. Surely Sandy would know if a CEC was required for one of Tobago's major road projects in one of its most environmentally sensitive areas. And, if a CEC was not required, then he would know why.

But he didn't.

"It may not have needed a CEC as it is an improvement on an existing road," he guessed.

Really? I wondered aloud. Isn't this major earth-moving project an entirely new road, with new cuttings that bear no resemblance at all to what had gone before?

He said he would find out why no CEC existed.

The next day Sandy discovered it wasn't a new project at all, but was a later incarnation of a multi-million-dollar EU-funded road programme that never actually happened. An EIA had been done for that project, said Sandy, a hint of triumph in his voice. Therefore, he confidently continued, as this project was approved before CEC legislation came into force in 2001 it didn't need a CEC. It was an old project.

But wasn't he missing the point? According to Sandy himself, the current construction project didn't begin until late 2002-a whole year and a half after CEC legislation became law. What mattered, I said, was that the legislation's spirit be adhered to precisely because of the environmental sensitivity and what the road was said to be doing to Tobago's prized coral reefs.

Surely, I reasoned, anyone thinking of building a major road along mountainsides above coral reefs would seek environmental clearance and put mitigation measures in place as a matter of course.

But Sandy could offer no comfort except to agree that CEC legislation should ideally apply to any environmentally risky project, regardless of date of approval. But even that was cold comfort.

"There are problems," he then admitted, noting that questions have been raised about the engineering of the road.

Given its importance and risk to the environment, why hadn't Sandy been on top of this project from the outset? Why hadn't he visited the site months earlier as requested by Environment Tobago? He had had men there, he responded. He had no reports from them on problems and he had no evidence of damage to the marine environment and silting of the reefs.

I tried to reach Hilton Sandy, the THA Secretary for Infrastructure, but there was no reply to many messages.

THA Chief Secretary Orville London had told me to call Hilton Sandy because he wasn't in possession of the minutiae of the link road, like whether there was need for a CEC.

Instead, London told me the road had a chequered history. It was originally to have been funded by the European Union (EU) but that fell through because it didn't meet the criteria, and he also mentioned the lack of potential road traffic.

So his administration had decided to fund the project themselves, he said. The job was contracted on an open tender to Raghunath Singh & Co Ltd of Thick Village, Siparia. The EU Charges D'Affairs in Port of Spain, Anthony Smallwood, told me that traffic was one consideration for not funding the project under the eighth European Development Fund. The other was that the road did not meet environmental criteria.

Instead, said Smallwood, the EU decided to fund a North East Management Plan for Tobago commissioned by the THA.

According to ET, that plan included the management and mitigating measures needed for the L'Anse Fourmi-Charlotteville road to control and minimise the siltation of rivers, watercourses, lagoons and reefs, etc.

The topography of the area-steep slopes, changes in land use-all carry a high risk of increased soil erosion.

I asked Tobago's "environmental chief" if he shouldn't halt the construction project that he himself had raised questions about.

"I can't stop it," protested Ray Sandy.

Now that his colleagues at the EMA are aware of the road, perhaps they will.