2025-07-01
26 分钟This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service with me, Liana Hosea.
This is a story of a lost ship and one of the worst disasters in the history of Sri Lanka,
an island nation known as the Pearl of the Indian Ocean.
Position two six degrees one five decimal three five north.
It begins in 2021, 2,000 miles from Sri Lanka on the Express Pearl,
a huge new cargo ship with almost 1,500 containers stacked in its hold and high on deck.
The ship had set sail from Dubai on May 10th,
but just a day later the crew noticed a problem.
We've obtained a copy of the transcript from the Express Pearls Voyage Data Recorder,
the ship's black box.
The ship owner says the transcript is incomplete and incorrect and is being contested in court.
Our copy came from court documents submitted by the Sri Lankan Attorney General to the Supreme Court in Colombo.
It's never been published before.
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.
The words of the ship's Russian captain Vitaly Tuitkalo are spoken by a BBC producer.
The crew used seawater to wash the deck to stop the acid corroding the ship.
What's more, they'd also started seeing orange smoke coming from the container.
Throughout the voyage, the captain kept updating his bosses about what was going on.
But leakage remain on deck and maybe more and more corrosion.