HGP NIGHTLY NEWS – Months after authorities struggled to tell a worried nation exactly how many people were aboard the MV Barima and how many had survived, the Commission of Inquiry has heard that some figures being recorded during the emergency response were coming from the media.
The revelation came from Director of Air Navigation Services at the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority, Rickford Samaroo, as Commissioners questioned him about an operational record showing 67 persons rescued and another 66 being searched for.
Asked where those figures originated, Samaroo acknowledged: “Well, that’s what we had from the media releases.”
Pressed further on whether the information had come from the media, he confirmed, “Media, yeah.”
And while news organisations continued updating their figures as more information emerged, Samaroo acknowledged that those subsequent changes were not reflected in the authority’s log.
“No, not in our log,” he told the Commission.
The testimony now provides another piece of the puzzle surrounding the confusion over numbers that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the July 18 disaster.
In the early hours of the response, government officials initially reported that the vessel had departed with 116 passengers and 17 crew members, based on the official manifest.
But that picture quickly began to unravel.
Public Works Minister Juan Edghill subsequently disclosed that of the first 67 people rescued, only 35 appeared on the passenger manifest. That meant 32 of those survivors had not been recorded as passengers on the official list, leaving authorities unable at that stage to say with certainty how many people had actually been aboard the vessel.
The uncertainty continued as the rescue operation progressed.
The number of persons reported rescued moved from 67 to 69 and later 77, before being revised to 76 as information from different sources was reviewed and duplication removed.
Authorities eventually turned to CCTV footage from the Georgetown wharf to reconstruct who had actually boarded the ferry. That review established a working figure of 179 persons aboard, comprising 161 passengers and 18 crew members.
Now, Samaroo’s testimony has revealed that within at least one arm of the emergency response, figures on those rescued and still being searched for were being taken from media reports rather than independently generated casualty data.
His evidence does not establish that this caused the wider discrepancies, but it adds a significant new dimension to the Commission’s examination of how critical information was collected, verified, shared and recorded while families waited desperately for answers.
The Commission is continuing its examination of the coordination and information systems used during the response to one of Guyana’s deadliest maritime disasters.
