Nearly 21 months after it sank following a huge fire, the last remnants of the wreck of the X-Press Pearl containership are expected to be cleaned up off the Sri Lankan coastline in the coming few days.
China’s Shanghai Salvage has been working to remove the ship for the past few months, cutting it in half as well as cleaning the ocean floor where it came to rest.
The ship, carrying nitric acid and plastic pellets among its cargoes, was responsible for the biggest marine plastic spill in history when it sank in May 2021. Sri Lanka has since submitted a proposal to the International Maritime Organization to classify plastic pellets as hazardous substances after up to 70bn of them washed up on Sri Lanka’s western shoreline in the island republic’s worst ever ecological disaster.
Sri Lanka’s Marine Environment Protection Agency (MEPA) has posted many images of the huge salvage operation with the two parts of the rusty hull being loaded onto vessels and sent to Singapore for recycling.
Source : Splash247
