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Verified WorldsAid record

CONTAINER SHIP "X-PRESS PEARL" with 1486 containers on board carrying dangerous TOXIC Cargo Disaster

Hazzardous Material

Severity score13 / 100 · Watch

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.

Last verified12 Jun 2021
Date
Status
CLOSED
Aid Zone
ASIA
Countries
Sri Lanka
Agency
Local Gov

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.

Permanent node 775 · Historical archive

In brief

  • What happenedOn 20 May 2021, cargo ship “X-PRESS PEARL with 1486 containers on board carrying dangerous cargo; 25 tonnes of nitric acid, caustic soda, solid sodium methoxide solution, cosmetics, methanol and vinyl acetate including micro plastics, plastic pellets together with other cargo caught fire about nine nautical miles (16 K
  • How many affectedAffected persons: 25
  • 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 20 May 2021, cargo ship “X-PRESS PEARL with 1486 containers on board carrying dangerous cargo; 25 tonnes of nitric acid, caustic soda, solid sodium methoxide solution, cosmetics, methanol and vinyl acetate including micro plastics, plastic pellets together with other cargo caught fire about nine nautical miles (16 K

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. 1 human-impact figure was separated from the narrative and dated where the source allowed. Earlier observations remain in the evidence history instead of being silently overwritten.

Verified figures

Affected persons
25 retained at 2021-06-12

What we knew when

  1. WorldsAid record entered the retained historical dataset.
  2. 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

Record integrity:
VerifiedSHA-256 d095d8bcad220e563b055d84462d10910dffa6a075f409b123eb779d2aea9484

No external source link was stored for this record.

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