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State prosecutors in Sri Lanka are accusing X-Press Feeders and its parent Sea Consortium of a cover-up as court proceedings get underway in Colombo looking into the blaze and sinking of the 2,700 teu X-Press Pearl
State prosecutors alleged yesterday that Sea Consortium Lanka, the local agent for the ship, deleted key emails.
The Singapore-registered X-Press Pearl reported an onboard acid leak to its representative Sea Consortium Lanka nine days prior to the ship entering Sri Lankan waters, but the agent failed to alert authorities in Columbo, the state prosecutor said.
Emails between Sea Consortium and the Russian master of the X-Press Pearl, Tyutkalo Vitaly, had been wiped, the prosecutor claimed. The court has demanded X-Press Feeders locate these missing emails from mail servers overseas.
Ports in Qatar and India had earlier refused to offload a leaking acid container which had been loaded onboard the three-month-old ship in Jebel Ali, Dubai.
Investigators are also going through the ship’s voyage data recorder (VDR), which divers managed to retrieve over the weekend.
The X-Press Pearl’s sad fate is the latest in a disappointing recent and persistent catalogue of container ship fires of varying degrees of severity, which occur on an almost weekly basis. The vast majority of these are initiated by a cargo of a hazardous nature. One estimate puts the number of mis- or undeclared dangerous cargoes in excess of 150,000 containers a year – each of which has disastrous potential.
While still to be fully investigated, the catalyst for the inferno on the X-Press Pearl has been asserted to be a leakage of nitric acid, which was correctly declared but apparently incorrectly packaged or packed. There were around 25 tonnes packed on the 1,486 laden containers on the ship, as well as many tonnes of micro plastics which have been washing on Sri Lanka’s western shorelines over the past fortnight.
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