The gas was seeping into the water by way of broken pipes related to a ballast water consumption on ship.
Colombo, Sri Lanka:
broken oil tanker off the island’s east coast, the navy mentioned Saturday, in a salvage operation after the large week-long blaze.
Whereas the navy says no crude oil has escaped the cargo of the New Diamond, leaked diesel gas had created a two-kilometre-long slick within the Indian Ocean that was seen from the air.
The gas was seeping into the water by way of broken pipes related to a ballast water consumption on the ship’s starboard facet, in response to a navy assertion.
That leak was plugged on Friday together with an inlet on the port facet of the Panama-registered tanker, it mentioned.
Dutch salvage firm SMIT mentioned its consultants had boarded the crippled vessel and located the 270,000-tonne crude oil cargo unaffected by the fireplace.
“The cargo tanks with the crude are intact,” the agency informed AFP in The Hague on Friday. “Discussions are ongoing on the vacation spot of the vessel to switch the crude.”
Sri Lanka’s environmental authorities worry a marine catastrophe if the tanker is allowed to switch its oil to a different ship within the nation’s waters.
The hearth was utterly doused on Wednesday, however an unspecified quantity of the ship’s 1,700 tonnes of gas leaked when storage tanks ruptured within the blaze that destroyed the engine room and far of the vessel’s super-structure.
“The Sri Lankan navy, the Indian Coast Guard (ICG) and tug boats that had been concerned in fire-fighting are nonetheless within the space,” the navy mentioned.
It added that an Indian plane used to spray chemical compounds to disperse the diesel slick up to now two days was on standby.
Sri Lanka has requested the ship’s homeowners to tow it away from the nation’s unique financial zone, or 370 kilometres (231 miles) from its coast.
The New Diamond issued a misery sign per week in the past whereas passing Sri Lanka on its method to the northeast Indian port of Paradip when a boiler exploded, killing a Filipino crewman.
The remaining 22 crew had been rescued.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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