On the morning of May 25, a Liberian-flagged cargo ship, MSC ELSA 3, carrying roughly 640 declared containers, sank off the coast of Kerala state in southern India. Indian authorities rescued all 24 crew on board, but most of the containers remain untraced and their contents unknown, raising environmental concerns, reports contributor Navya PK for Mongabay India.
MSC, the ship’s operator and the world’s biggest shipping company, is headquartered in Geneva, while the ELSA3 was registered in Liberia, Navya writes.
India’s defense ministry said 13 of the ship’s containers were carrying hazardous materials, although it didn’t give details. Another 12 containers held calcium carbide, used in steelmaking and fertilizer production. In its raw form, it reacts with water to form flammable gases and can increase water alkalinity, posing a risk to the local marine ecosystem, Navya writes.
By May 27, 46 containers had washed ashore in south Kerala; the rest were still unaccounted for. “None of the recovered containers have calcium carbide, which means we need to have a thorough search for the declared materials,” Biju Kumar, a marine biologist at Kerala University, told Mongabay India.
The ship also had 367 metric tons of furnace oil and 84 metric tons of diesel. Atul Pillai, a defense ministry spokesperson in the Kerala port city of Kochi, said the Indian Coast Guard had largely contained the oil spill.
“Earlier, the spill was visible from the aircraft; now, there are only patches. Coast Guard has also now dispatched a pollution response strike team and a pollution response vessel from Mumbai to analyse and handle the contamination,” Pillai said.
Kumar said that while no immediate fish deaths had been reported, the oil contains hydrocarbons that can be persistent organic pollutants. “The oil will ultimately settle down, get converted into paraffin balls, and spread over long distances. That is a threat to the [seafloor] ecosystem.”
Since the ship’s sinking, large quantities of nurdles, or tiny plastic pellets used in plastic manufacturing, have washed ashore. However, items like plastic pellets “were not disclosed earlier,” Kumar said. “So, what is in the containers is a concern,” he added, noting this is India’s first reported case of plastic pellet pollution from a ship’s sinking.
Kumar said nurdles are tiny, buoyant and can travel far. They resemble fish eggs, and are thus easily mistaken for food for many aquatic animals. Nurdles can also further break down into micro- and nanoplastics, and enter the food chain, he said, adding that the plastic pellets should be removed from the spill sites and beaches as soon as possible. The Kerala state government said volunteers are being trained to remove pellets from the shore guided by drone surveys.
Marine fisheries and ocean research organizations are conducting surveys to understand the extent of the environmental damage.
Read the full story by Navya PK here.
Banner image: Containers floating at the site of the shipwreck. Image by Spokesperson of the Indian Navy via X.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
