Collin Piper, Paria’s Terminal Manager, who was the incident Commander on the day 4 LMCS divers were sucked into a 30” pipeline, called on members of the Commission of Enquiry to put themselves in his position regarding the decision that had to be made.
• Piper, while being questioned by Attorney Nyree Alfonso, said he was of the view that persons in the CoE room felt that it was a “walk-in-the-park” on that day, where they could have simply sent people into the pipeline to make a rescue without knowing if there were any dangers ahead.
• He said, “It wasn’t a simple situation…You simply don’t understand what we went through… It wasn’t a simple decision to send someone inside that pipeline.”
• He also said that while he understood and appreciated the courage of Michael Kurban, who wanted to go into the pipeline to aid in rescuing his father, he also looked at it in the reverse, where if he was a father inside that pipeline, he would not want his son to risk his life coming to save him when the conditions were unknown.
