Sri Lanka: The X-Press Pearl disaster

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2021, a huge container ship, the X-Press Pearl caught fire and sank off the coast of Sri Lanka, releasing hazardous materials, toxic chemicals and more than 1000 tonnes of microplastic pellets into the sea. The UN called it an environmental catastrophe. Today, Sri Lanka is still counting the cost. Leana Hosea visits Sri Lanka to investigate the legacy of the disaster, and find out why, four years on, there’s still a battle for compensation.

This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from Assignment, investigations and journeys into the heart of global events.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service with me, Leana Hosea.
0:05.9	This is a story of a lost ship and one of the worst disasters in the history of Sri Lanka,
0:12.1	an island nation known as the pearl of the Indian Ocean.
0:15.9	Position 2.6 degrees 15.35 north.
0:20.3	It begins in 2021, 2,000 miles from Sri Lanka on the express
0:25.9	pearl a huge new cargo ship with almost 1,500 containers stacked in its hold and high on deck
0:33.2	0 5 4 degrees on 1 decimal the ship had set sail from Dubai on May 10th, but just a day later, the crew noticed a problem.
0:44.2	We've obtained a copy of the transcript from the Express Pearl's Voyage data recorder, the ship's black box.
0:51.1	The ship owner says the transcript is incomplete and incorrect and is being contested in court.
0:56.8	Our copy came from court documents submitted by the Sri Lankan Attorney General to the Supreme Court in Colombo.
1:03.2	It's never been published before.
1:06.1	It shows that the problem the crew had found early in the voyage was that a shipping container packed full of nitric acid was leaking.
1:15.2	The words of the ship's Russian captain, Vitali Tuat Kolo,
1:18.5	are spoken by a BBC producer.
1:21.1	Yes, about one liter an hour remained the same.
1:25.6	We're washing deck continuously by a fire pump.
1:29.3	Seawater because main deck too much corrosion.
1:35.3	Only one problem. A very strong chemical.
1:38.3	Very strong chemical.
1:42.3	The crew used seawater to wash the deck to stop the acid corroding the ship.
1:48.4	What's more, they'd also started seeing orange smoke coming from the container.
1:53.5	Throughout the voyage, the captain kept updating his bosses about what was going on.
	...

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