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Transport Minister Chee Hong Tat has addressed questions on the time it took for a contractor to prevent further oil spillage following an allision between a dredger and a bunker vessel at Pasir Panjang Terminal on June 14. After Chee delivered his minOil spill incident: Contractor was not slow in preventing further spillage, says Chee
Transport Minister Chee Hong Tat has addressed questions on the time it took for a contractor to prevent further oil spillage following an allision between a dredger and a bunker vessel at Pasir Panjang Terminal on June 14. After Chee delivered his ministerial statement on the oil spill incident in Parliament on Tuesday (July 2), Workers' Party MP Dennis Tan noted that it took over 14 hours for Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore's (MPA) contractor T&T Salvage Asia to deploy 200m of containment booms around the damaged vessel Marine Honour. He then asked the transport minister why Oil Spill Response Limited (OSRL), the largest international industry-funded cooperative providing oil spill response services, was not mobilised concurrently with T&T immediately after the allision. Such a move would have prevented the oil spill from spreading further into Singapore waters, said Tan, who is also a practising lawyer at a maritime law firm. Responding to Tan's question, Chee said: «There is a certain underlying assumption (from Tan) that T&T had been slow and had not been doing its work properly. That's not the case.» Read more