Sri Lanka: The X-Press Pearl disaster

BBC-podkast on suunnittu järjestelmää. Vain niin voitan tän luunasjahneen. Kyllä, näistä liikennäase milla on käynnissä luunasjahti, josta voit voittaa kuukauden luunaaat. Mukaan arvontaan osallistut jokakerta, kun käytät plussakorttia, ja sinästä liikennäase milla toinen elokuuta asti. Lisä tiedot, näistä pistettikautta plussa. Nähdellä on järjestelmää, jossa on pärää. Posisin 2-6° 15° 3-5°. Pärää on 2021, 2000 m. Sri Lanka, jossa on pärä, jossa on kärallistua, jossa on 15.000 m. kärleisää, jossa on kärleisää. 0,5, 4° on 1°. Sitten on järjestelmää on May 10, mutta näin on kärallistua, että kärallistua on tullut. Tämä on järjestelmää, jossa on kärallistua, jossa on pärää, jossa on kärallistua, jossa on kärallistua. Sitten on järjestelmää, jossa on kärallistua, jossa on kärallistua, jossa on kärallistua, solchen täystä mukavaa. Ja bertäissä mandutod Coldriceelle. Sen on paikallistut jos 쓰i. Onhan valta jonneala, mikä nyt bearingsi saaat. On paikallistut tuossa kertaa kertaa. Seetä, koska kertaa kertaa kertaa. Onnita on maailmaa ja on maailmaa ja on maailmaa. Jaa kertaa, että hän on maailmaa ja miettää kertaa kertaa kertaa. Olemme miettää, että on saavasti miettää, joten on kertaa kertaa kertaa kertaa. mituun uskon kasza monen ettei komantkeita tavardot ystävija aften samassa yksinkin kent nopea syntyvääーいit. Anonymous juhwan eite mWS одногоa autreja juicyント eingeni tämä rättooigoil臀 ei saisi nyt koodin koroa lavawat, mutta pulident replaced מא׵ ja oppa t ahí kategode不會ien n givecession itsens environments. Kaw妹usp이 on teki Hisboses kетkä tapahtettaan vuoden negoihin kiel== hei nii, ei ole niitä kertaa keskusten kertaa niitä jäi kertaa. Ja yksi ei ole kokonus. Ei ole kertaa niitä jäi kertaa. Kuten kertaa jäi kertaa ja onko kertaa, joita ei ole kertaa niitä jäi kertaa niitä jäi kertaa niitä jäi kertaa. Vaikka sillä on tosiaan jälkeen. Se on tullut olemme, se on tullut olemme kertaa niitä jäi kertaa niitä jäi kertaa. 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Seotti suガa ja jo Vikkanut ja minuus FlookOO толut, meitä on miettä بывäירylene närti on blöntäiale. Häknut sen juttu svistai著u trend mateixポ With - on sellainen, jossa on näy hienoa. Täällä on käyä kriinä, että teemme näy kriinä. Onko kriinä, on kriinä, on kriinä, on jokin. Olettaen, että on järjestelmä ja on järjestelmä ja on järjestelmä. Onko kriinä, että on järjestelmä ja on järjestelmä ja on järjestelmä ja on järjestelmä. Tokavojelissa on aikaan, että on järkeä. Pikn ülke Kaiken, hirkaleju katsomaisi n baunni ja näkyvät edelleen. Pohinkuvassa matomuoleista seuraava, mutta sinulla ei näyttänyt jonka Windu ちäisiä. Koutukien jälkssä lähitaisi ja pärquestän satSONniin. Sosia能apaaphti! zooiriitusellification on enserna Cast dementia! On on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on. On on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on. As the express power burned and went down, it released a toxic cocktail into the sea. As the ship was oiled from the ship, but among the cargo were tons of acid, caustic soda, lead, copper slag, lithium batteries, as well as 9000 tons of epoxy resin, which is toxic to aquatic life, and 1600 tons of plastic pellets, as well as 9000 tons of epoxy resin, which is toxic to aquatic life, and 1600 tons of plastic pellets, you encoded the largest plastic spill on record. The ship's captain still faces charges over the pollution and has been forced to stay in Sri Lanka for years awaiting trial. I'm Liana Huzir, and for assignment, I've come to Sri Lanka to investigate the legacy of the disaster, and find out why four years on, there's still a battle for compensation. In some ways, this was the front line of the express power disaster. We're on a small fiberglass fishing boat out in the Nighamba Lagoon, which connects to the Indian Ocean on the west coast of Sri Lanka. The waters are muddy green, and the banks are lined with mangrove trees. The express power sank just a few miles from here off the coast. The fishermen here say what happened in those days four years ago, change their lives. "Kalu, dumakta mauturagi, umu, burak!" First there was huge smoke, dark smoke over the Nighamba Lagoon. Jude Salanta is a fisherman. In his early forties, he's lean, strong, wears a t-shirt and shorts, his net is piled onto the prow of his boat. He looks out towards the channel, which connects the Lagoon to the sea. "I saw a huge bowl of fire coming out of the ship, and then the beach was covered with oil, dead turtles, and shipping containers. I kind of felt it was the end of the world." "Fishing used to be a good trade here. People with their own boats earned comparatively good money. But for months after the disaster, there was a ban on fishing in the Lagoon and the ocean." "It was as if my hands were broken. It's not only me, you know. We had nothing, no income at all. The whole community, the whole fishing community felt the same. We felt so helpless." Even now Jude says the fishing industry hasn't recovered. "There's no fish since then. We've never had the same amount of fish that we used to catch. And so our lives have turned upside down. And from the stretch where the ship sank, up until here, you don't get many new young fish at all." The ship's owner says to date it has paid more than $130 million to remove the wreck and debris at sea, and so far have paid more than $20 million to the Sri Lankan government for cleaner corporations on the coast and to compensate fishermen. Jude says he did receive a small payment from the government to compensate for the temporary fishing ban, but he says it only covered a few days of losses. Jude says he, like many fishermen, took out loans to make ends meet, which he's struggling to repay. "Mama, aango, mama, yleens, yleens, yleens, yleens, yleens, yleens." Honestly, yesterday I had only one meal. Even the day before yesterday, I only had one meal. I'm not lying. This is the reality of other fishermen as well. And getting other stuff for the kids, books for school and other equipment is a struggle. Even now, we've never managed to get our lives back to how it was before. "We just come across another catamaran. pattern around of fishermen. There's five fishermen and four of them are in the water. The fishermen have brought the net all closer together and they're gonna pull up the net with their catch. You can see how I can see what the cabbage is like. Yeah there's really hardly any fish at all that I can see. There's nets of empty. So like one is how this is finished. Part of the problem is that there are of course other things that can affect the catch in the lagoon and the ocean. Overfishing, climate change, other sources of pollution like sewage and waste from factories. But the fishermen here say their problems started after the express pearl and at that time all along the western coast of Sri Lanka the disaster was physically having an impact. All this was just feels like out of a war movie. It was debris all around. We started seeing hurdles getting washed up with similar sort of traits like the skin, the burn marks, the skin was peeling off the nose and the eyes were like red puffed up and we saw dolphins washing up and the big area like the skin was like peeling off like red. Muradda Kattavavala is an environmentalist and founder of the Power Protectors, a local NGO that volunteered to help the cleaner corporations which were largely run by the Sri Lankan state authorities with funding from the ship owners. There is a debate about the lasting impacts of the disaster but at least one material for the ship is still visible today. And that's the tiny plastic pellets given the innocuous name Nurdles. They are the microplastic raw materials used to manufacture plastic products and the ship had containers full of them. I mean it's the biggest Nurdle disaster ever recorded in the world. Each container would have had billions of Nurdles in one container and we're talking about 410, estimated 410. We don't know how much was actually spilled out into the ocean but this beach was a piece and feet of layers of Nurdles that were washing up. It was like snow on the beaches just why they were it was horrifying. And over time says Muditha these pellets were dragged by the currents all around the island and even across the sea to neighboring shores. And the disaster is not over I think it will persist for a lifetime. Usually plastic pellets remain in the environment for years and years and years. When they float a lot of fish would mistake them to be fish eggs because they're white in color they look very small they float they go and consume them and it doesn't digest and so it gets stuck inside. You could just imagine how much of marine environment the marine life would have been effectively. So ever since people have been painstakingly collecting these tiny grains of plastic. So we're just walking along the beach here and come across these group of women with giant rectangular sips wearing big rubber gloves sifting the sand. One of the women tells me she's part of a team and on a daily basis they collect about two to three kilograms of Nurdles. She's been doing it for three years and it's very hard work out here in the hot sun. Look what they found they found loads of these plastic pellets the Nurdles. This is a Nurdle like her small seed maybe half an apple seed that's the size. And these ones are she's having me a clump of burnt Nurdles so they've all burned together probably in the fire and they've just molded together in this kind of nobly black lump. They're four years on and they're still picking out the debris from the disaster. There is growing research that plastic can harm animals if it's eaten and can also leach its plastic chemicals into the environment. But there's another concern about these pellets that they are actually contaminated by other toxins in the sea which may have come from the spill. Since the disaster local scientists have collected Nurdles to see how they change over time but Sri Lanka like many developing countries has limited resources when it comes to laboratories to do testing. So months ago I sent more than 20 of their samples covering a four-year period to David Megson a forensic chemist specialising in environmental pollution at Manchester Metropolitan University. On the line from Manchester he tells me what he's found. Some of those plastic pellets were quite heavily contaminated the ones that were involved in the fire and they will have leached their pollution into the environment. The plastic pellets that are still going round appear to be sucking up more pollution from the environment and are becoming more toxic. How does that work? Why? So the I guess plastic is brilliant at sucking sucking things up and so as it goes through the ocean it's just kind of passively picking up chemicals that are being stuck to the side of it. So what are the implications of these pellets still being in the environment? I mean are the levels of these toxins that you've found on the plastic pellets that have harmful to a aquatic life? They were elevated so they're not going to be making the animals healthier. Some of those plastic pellets will be ingested by marine organisms they will pass pollution on to marine organisms but it's really hard to do that risk assessments because we don't know how many pellets have been eaten and how much pollution comes off the pellets and what that doses to the organism. But placed on top of everything else that is in that system there's a really good likelihood that it's causing harm to the environment and also potentially harm to people and humans that are eating and relying on that marine ecosystem for a source of their food as well. Obviously the plastic pellets came from the ship but you know these are the toxins and metals that you're finding in the plastics. Could that be linked to what's built from the ship? It's really difficult to say we were finding elevated concentrations of some pollutants which were present on the ship and some of the other rare metals that we don't normally find in such higher abundancies we found some of those on the on the side of the pellets but some of the things linked to that ship are I guess what we'd consider quite generic pollutants so heavy metals and they can come from so many different sources mining urban areas and so trying to find something that's specifically linked to that ship in the express pearl is incredibly incredibly difficult. Yeah and I suppose that applies to all kinds of shipping disasters. Exactly yeah and that's that's why there's massive legal cases for hundreds of millions of dollars trying to to argue on the scale of the damage and who's responsible for it. And certainly a key question for the Sri Lankan authorities is what is the long-term cost of the disaster. In the aftermath the government assembled a team of 40 scientists to assess the damage and I'm here at the University of Sri Jai Vardhana Pura in the capital Colombo to meet Professor Prasanti Gurdne Vardhana an environmental economist who is the co-chair of the expert committee. The total damage we calculated as an interim number as a six billion US dollars. That would seem like a lot of money. How did you calculate this large sum of over six billion dollars. In fact I wouldn't call it a large number given the damage that has occurred so the largest portion of this damage he has been calculated for the loss of turtles. In Sri Lanka we have a very large industry to see the female turtles who are coming to lay eggs in our coastal areas. It's a very popular tourism attracting activity among the foreigners. Some 400 dead sea turtles washed ashore in the aftermath of the disaster. And using ecological modeling Sri Lankan scientists estimated that at least five times that number died out at sea. So they have available estimates what is the value we derived in the Sri Lankan economy per turtle. So based on that we looked at how many turtles have died and the large turtle numbers that we are going to lose in the future, according to the estimates available from our biological modeling. So using these two figures we came up with this 4.3 billion US dollar value for the lost value of the turtles. The committee also estimated that the losses to the fishing industry were just over a billion dollars. There were other costs too, including the impact on the local human population from the toxic cloud released when the ship burned. During this process it has been shown by the scientific evidence that large quantities of dioxide and fuel ran have been added to the atmosphere and these are carcinogens and then we have calculated it may kill nearly about 70 people in our country. The ship has been reject this assessment. They quote I top the International Tankerone as Pollution Federation, an organisation specialising in assessing maritime spills funded by the shipping industry. It says the report was unparticularised, inaccurate and lacked credible scientific basis. It's the science on your side and you're confident that you're going to get this compensation that you're looking for from the shipping industry. Yeah, I'm not sure whether we are getting it or not, but I'm very sure that this is much lower value than the actual damage we have incurred. Because we are talking about a damage that will persist, our ecosystem will degrade, our fish field will go down, the human health will be going down. This big lack of this international justice is the question. As a small country, we can't go beyond our capacities, but definitely what I can say is really unethical and unfair. I'm listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. And the documentary. Red Go, China is the world's largest. Where the UNE has been saying that the Portuguese language is not the case of the Chinese and the Chinese. We have to use the idea of the Chinese and the Chinese to make sure that the Chinese and the Chinese are all connected. And we are going to talk about the Japanese language of the Portuguese language. The Portuguese language is also the case of the Chinese. Let's go to the film. The English language is a very important part of the story. Since the express pearl disaster, Sri Lanka has gone through a lot of political upheaval. A few years ago, a popular piece for uprising over through the government amidst allegations of rampant corruption. In September 2024, a new government came to power, promising proper compensation for the victims of the shipping disaster. I've come to the Environment Ministry to meet Dr. David Rakhari Abhassam, the Minister's advisor. So tell me why are you taking the ship owners and the insurers to court? They've said that they've done a good job clearing up and have paid compensation already. We think they don't give enough money to recover the damage they have done to the nature and to the people. They have only paid money, only for the incident, not for the correlation things. Still, we have the effect because of the express pearl, to the sea turtle, to the fish and our food system and our ecology. What are you hoping to get from the court case? Assessment done by the 40 scientists put the price tag at $6.4 billion. We are assessing now those things, but that is the basic information that we have. And we are gathering some other information to improve this document. How important is it for Sri Lanka to win this compensation from the ship owners? If we win this court case, we can give a message to the world that the sea is not the property of a ship owner. Because this is our world. They have to respect the environment, they have to respect the sea and the animals of even the small countries. We requested an interview with the ship's owner. Nobody was available, but they gave us a statement. From the very start, we have worked diligently to ensure the best response, clean up and claims process possible while abiding by international law. We apologise to the people of Sri Lanka for the effects that this incident is having on their lives, and we continue to be disappointed by the delays in the clean up process. The owners, the master and the crew all followed the internationally accepted procedures in dealing with the acid leak while maintaining all safety and emergency protocols. The vessel requested emergency birthing for the leaking container to be discharged on the 20th of May 2021, so that the container could have been removed on the 20th of May, and this catastrophe could have been avoided. However, the Colombo port did not allow this request. What followed was a series of catastrophic failures by the Colombo port, compounded by a lack of urgency and action with weather conditions seriously escalating the situation on board. The Sri Lankan government categorically rejects that the disaster occurred due to issues at Colombo port. The core cases are still ongoing, but the disaster has a lasting legacy. There is growing awareness of the impact of the maritime industry on the environment, and pollution from shipping is not as rare as you might think. There's global satellite images showing thousands of oil spills that go unreported and unpunished annually. There are also accidents. In June 2025, a huge fire ripped through another container ship carrying hazardous cargo on route from Colombo to India. Sri Lanka lies on a major shipping lane, so there are concerns that accidents like the express park can and will happen again. Back on the coast, the environmentalist Mudatha believes that if one does developing nations like Sri Lanka will still struggle to cope, will still struggle for proper compensation. I don't think we are prepared. That's what's even more alarming. We see all these ships passing through us. It looks like ships are actually dumping their waste onto the sea. Who's taking action? Who's really monitoring this? I think that is where we are going to start. And this is where I see discrepancy in developing countries, versus developed countries, especially when it comes to the maritime sector. The sea is the lifeblood of this island nation. Its stunning coast is a huge draw for tourists and for generations fishing has fed the country. But for Jude, the fisherman out on his boat ever since the disaster, he's worried that his way of life no longer has a future. Many are selling their boats and trying to go abroad, and many people are fed up. In fact, my son himself, he's working with me at the moment. He's also a fisherman, but he's also considering leaving the country. It's already been several years, you know. If we were going to get justice, we would have had it by now. This episode of the documentary was presented by me, Liana Hosea, the producer was Alex Last. The local producer was Sarah Pathirana, a fellow of the Pulitzer Center's OSHA reporting network. The sound mix was by Neil Churchill, the production coordinator was Gemma Ashman, the assignment series editor is Penny Murphy. The sound mix is a place where you can get your own coffee. Yes, just a little bit of history and a good hint of this island. This is the sea. The sea is a very popular place.