The MV X Press Pearl, which is still on fire, has attracted the attention of the whole of Sri Lanka. So, a short while ago, the popular international website splash247.com, which is engaged in naval news reporting, had reported controversial news about this ship.
According to the news, the incident is as follows
The ship, registered in the Port of Singapore, is only 3 months old. 186 meters long and 34 meters wide, this Chinese-made ship has a capacity of approximately 2700 containers. Even now, ship owners have acknowledged that their shipwreck is a “constructive total loss”. This phrase is a word commonly used in marine insurance. The meaning of this is very simply explained as follows.
“A constructive total loss in marine cargo insurance means that the cost of repair of a damaged item is more than the current value of the item. In other words, the cost of repairing a damaged item is more than the current value of the damaged item”.
The fire on this ship is now completely extinguished. The remaining cargo and the ship rescued, but the total amount of cargo and non-destroyed cargo sold is not enough to compensate for the damage now being done. Right now, how serious is the shipowner’s statement?
The ship has already been declared as General Average
It is also reported that this ship has already been declared as “General Average“. This term is also frequently used in maritime insurance. The implication is that the ship carrying the cargo alone will not be held responsible in the event of such a disaster. That is, the responsibility falls on the cargo owners of each container on board the ship at that time.
However, this is the story to be told, as previously reported by the popular website. According to Tim Hartnoll, Singapore’s General Manager of X-Press Feeders, “The ship sailed thousands of nautical miles to Sri Lanka, in the Arabian Sea. The crew reported a concentrated acid leak from containers stored on the deck of the ship, which was entirely due to the use of unsafe and cheap packaging methods, so the ship’s captain, who saw the leak called the harbor. Both had asked for permission to unload these leaking containers, but they were not even allowed to unload them at the Port, Hazira on the west coast of India, and Hamad in the State of Qatar. “It was a case of not in my backyard syndrome,” he said, adding that the condition was not a secret he knew.
The website further reports that the ship’s owners are now confident that the London P & I Insurance Association will acknowledge that the ship suffered a Total Loss. According to the world’s naval statistics, such container fires occur every two weeks during shipping worldwide.
India, Maldives and Sri Lanka now have a nightmare to handle. https://t.co/aReQ3YHiWr
— 𝕯𝖗. DMCAed 𝕭𝖆𝖙𝖒𝖆𝖓 (@Our_Levodopa) May 26, 2021
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