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Authorities in Sri Lanka are trying to head off a potential environmental disaster as a fire-damaged container ship that had been carrying chemicals sinks off the country’s main port.
The MV X-Press Pearl started sinking on Wednesday, a day after authorities extinguished a fire that had raged on the vessel for 12 days.
Efforts to tow the ship into deeper waters away from the port in Colombo failed after the ship’s stern became submerged and rested on the seabed.
The MV X-Press Pearl is pulled by a navel vessel (Eranga Jayawardena/AP)
The Singapore-flagged ship’s operators, X-Press Feeders, said the fire destroyed most of the ship’s cargo, which included 25 tons of nitric acid and other chemicals, but there are fears that remaining chemicals and hundreds of tons of oil from the fuel tanks could leak into the sea.