MW Wakashio Oil Spill
Hazzard
How the score is calculated
The score starts at 8. It adds points from recorded affected, deaths, displaced and casualty counts, plus terms found in the story title, event type or status. For each count, only its highest matching band is used.
- Affected people
- 1–999: +5 · 1,000–9,999: +12 · 10,000–99,999: +20 · 100,000–999,999: +28 · 1 million+: +35
- Deaths
- 1–9: +8 · 10–99: +14 · 100–999: +22 · 1,000+: +30
- Displaced people
- 1–9,999: +6 · 10,000–99,999: +12 · 100,000+: +18
- Casualties
- 100 or more: +8
- Story wording
- +10 for terms such as catastrophe, famine, war, conflict, major earthquake, mass casualty or critical. Otherwise, +5 for active, ongoing, emergency, outbreak, cyclone or hurricane.
Score bands: Watch 0–24 · Moderate 25–49 · High 50–74 · Critical 75–100. Scores are capped at 100. Missing or unparseable figures add no points.
This is a rule-based WorldsAid triage indicator, not an official or independently validated classification. It does not account for recency or local context, and it can understate events with incomplete reporting. Check the linked sources.
Historical record
Status: CLOSED · Imported 2026-10-07
Closed for this historical import at the site owner’s request; not a new assessment of current conditions.
In brief
- What happenedOn 25 July 2020, a bulk carrier vessel, MW Wakashio, ran aground on the reef of Point d’Esny, off the coast of Mauritius.
- Reported impactThe cited sources do not yet provide a reliable affected-person total.
- What help is neededResponse priorities should be confirmed in the linked source reports as needs change.
What changed
First retained snapshot
No earlier verified snapshot is present in the recovered dataset. This record remains available as the historical baseline.
Situation
On 25 July 2020, a bulk carrier vessel, MW Wakashio, ran aground on the reef of Point d’Esny, off the coast of Mauritius. The vessel was carrying nearly 4,200 metric tons (MT) of fuel, including low-sulphur fuel oil (3,894 MT), diesel (207 MT) and lubricant oil (90 MT). The ship is located near ecologically sensitive and important areas, including the Point d’Esny Wetlands, Ile aux Aigrettes Nature Reserve, Blue Bay Marine Area, Mahebourg Fishing Reserves, barachois (coastal lagoons) and mangroves. The Point d’Esny Wetlands are designated as a site of international importance under the Convention on Wetlands (‘Ramsar Convention’). The Nagashiki Shipping Co. Ltd, which owns and manages the vessel, told media in an emailed statement that “due to bad weather and constant pounding over the past few days, the starboard side bunker tanker has been breached and an amount of fuel oil has escaped into the sea.” Preliminary satellite analysis conducted by UNOSAT found that the shipwreck location was approximately 2 kilometres from the shore at Point d’Esny and that 0.23km2 oil spill was observed by 6 August. Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth has declared a “state of environmental emergency” and said that the sinking of the boat “represents a danger” for the people of Mauritius. The country’s approximately 1.3 million inhabitants rely heavily on tourism, which has already been hard-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. (OCHA, 8 Aug 2020)
Linked charities and agencies
WorldsAid verification
A WorldsAid editor reviewed this record against the retained source record, cleaned feed formatting and checked the crisis, place and reporting date. No reliable human-impact total was promoted where the source did not provide one. Earlier observations remain in the evidence history instead of being silently overwritten.
What we knew when
- WorldsAid record entered the retained historical dataset.
- Last verification represented by this immutable snapshot.
Earlier figures are never replaced by later values; additional observations are retained as new ledger entries.
Provenance
This page renders the last verified WorldsAid cache directly in HTML. It does not treat generated summaries as primary evidence.
Cached dataset: worldsai_drup771.sql.gz
Verified
SHA-256 046c3570775de1271340259ccb3225e837b7ab78fc555cd678f1cb1bd60402b7No external source link was stored for this record.