?Eureka!? says Times; not so says government

It’s not often that we find newsworthy material on the pages of the Belize Times, but a story in today’s edition could not be ignored. Entitled ?Eureka!? the five-paragraph report breathlessly describes how on Tuesday the company drilling for petroleum at Spanish Lookout had finally struck oil. It depicted a ?gusher,? from which ?huge quantities of oil and gas came spurting out of the ground.? So much oil and gas that for safety’s sake the well had to be capped. Accompanying the dramatic words was an equally impressive picture of an oil well blasting a geyser of black gold hundreds of feet into the sky. Pretty big news… and in case you’re wondering why you haven’t heard it before, there’s a good reason: it’s not true. We don’t know whether the good editor has mistaken hemp oil for crude oil, but when we called government’s Inspector of Petroleum, Andre Cho, he told us emphatically that there has been absolutely no discovery of petroleum in commercial quantities and far from being capped, the well is still being drilled. Likewise, Sheila McCaffery, on site director of Belize Natural Energy Limited, today told News Five that she has no idea where the story came from and that they were still in the drilling process with several more weeks of work yet to be completed. The picture in the Times by the way, seems to have been lifted from an encyclopaedia.