Last night, 7News told you about the vessel, the MV Paranga, which was attempting to leave Belizean waters bound for Jamaica, when it had a mishap, and ended up being grounded approximately 2 miles southeast of English Caye.
Well today, we've been following up by contacting all the government departments involved but neither the Coast Guard nor the Port Authority would deign to give us a comment.
This evening though, we spoke to Martin Allegria, Chief Environmental Officer for the Department of Environment, and he told us briefly, via phone, what the environmental officers found yesterday:
Marin Allegria, Chief Environmental Officer
"Preliminary the grounding of her in old rubble, dead corals from years ago and there is some new growth of corals coming up - especially soft corals, small quantities, maybe like 10% of what I understand right now of the surface area. But all that we will know more once we do a thorough assessment."
"We understood today that the vessel is now off, we are setting up a team from the fisheries department, ourselves and the coast guard. We will be out there tomorrow morning in order to do assessment as thorough as we can of the actual site itself."
"Its base on that hopefully in the early afternoon we can have more details and more information on the extent and the type of damage in terms of live or dead corals or just sand bar. Whatever it was that it ran aground on."
We also asked him about the status of the crew and captain, and he told us that they will remain in Belize until the investigation has finished.
Marin Allegria, Chief Environmental Officer
"From the preliminary - it was just leaving, a few minutes thereafter. It was not active live corals as such. Fortunately for that but it is in old rubble corals as we call it."
"That is preliminary is not in area that would cause severe damage to coral formation. We will be going there tomorrow morning and then by Friday morning we will have everything already wrapped up. In the meantime we understand Port Authority, we have just spoken to them - we are working with the captain and the agency for us to try to resolve this fast - in the sense we are asking them to stay in Belize waters right now while we do the quick assessment tomorrow so that by Thursday we know what the incident is all about and where we are with the ship and the environmental issue thereof."
The authorities hope to have the results of their investigation as early as Friday, at which point, they will decide on whether or not they will pursue legal action against the company which owns the boat.
The lead organization, the Belize Port Authority, refused to comment saying that they will do so after they complete their investigation. At this point, there is no information about who or what was responsible for the navigational error.
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