KOCHI: The cargo vessel MSC Elsa-3, which had reported listing around 38 nautical miles off the coast of Kochi, sank into the depths of the Arabian Sea Sunday morning. The efforts to prevent the ship from sinking are failing. All the containers on the ship have fallen into the sea. The cause of the capsize may be water entering the ship. The 26-degree list is serious. Since it is an old ship, the pipes that use seawater to cool the engine parts may leak. If the water that has entered the ship cannot be pumped out in time, it may capsize. Bad weather may have accelerated the capsize.

A joint mission of various agencies to recover the container that went into the sea will start after checking whether there were any hazardous materials inside. People on the coast have been warned that these could wash ashore. The ship is presently sinking. However, the environmental damage caused by the sinking of the ship is worse than the loss caused by the loss of the ship. Modern equipment and expert assistance will be required to prevent the oil from spreading into the sea.

The general method is to place floating beds in the water to prevent the spread to other parts and then use oil-sucking materials. The coast guard has been trained to supervise the operations related to this. This part of the shipping channel should be declared a danger zone.

Meantime, there are salvage companies that can remove and raise the ship. They only need to be paid if the mission is successful. That reward could be a hefty sum. Since the Elsa 3 is an old ship, it will not be profitable. Therefore, the possibility of that is low. The Jan Richter, a cargo ship built at the shipyard in Poland by the German company Erschiffart and launched in 1997, became the container ship MSC Elsa 3 after nine name changes.

This is now a feeder ship, which is used to load containers onto mother ships and deliver them to smaller ports. It is not clear when it became a container ship. It is common practice to convert old cargo ships into feeder container ships. The ships will have their own disadvantages. Several ships of the MSC company have been converted in this way.