Editorial
Aftermath of X-Press Pearl

The recovery of the voyage data recorder (VDR) of the dangerous cargo laden container ship, X-Press Pearl, the burning and subsequent sinking of which caused this country an unprecedented and unimaginable environmental disaster may help ongoing investigations to establish where culpability for alleged negligence or irresponsibility lie. The VDR is the equivalent on a ship of the ‘black box’ voice and data recorder in the cockpit of an aircraft vital for investigation of a plane crash. Fortunately, merchant shipping authorities, assisted by the navy, were able to recover this instrument, from the bridge of the now submerged vessel. It is now available for analysis and a court order has already been made to begin this process.
But there have been reports that because there had been little, if any, navigation on the bridge since the ship’s crew was evacuated from the vessel on May 25, the VDR may not have recorded substantial new information about recent events on board. Nevertheless it provides an added resource for investigation of the disaster.
The matter that is most in contention at the time this is being in written is whether ship’s local agent had deleted email communications between the vessel and himself as has been alleged. The fact that there was a leak in a container of nitric acid on board the ship has been known several days before the vessel anchored in Colombo’s outer harbor. The vessel had in fact attempted to off load the leaking container at two other ports, one in the Middle East and the other in India. Hamad in Qatar said it did not accept transshipment containers while Hazira in India had pleaded lack of facilities.
If the port authorities here knew of the problem well in advance, it would most likely have permitted priority berthing to deal with the emergency. The Chinese-run CICT (China International Container Terminals) controlled by China Merchant Port Holdings, one of the world’s largest port operators, with state-of-the-art equipment, would well have been able to handle the task. This is what the head of the Ceylon Association of Steamer Agents said in a recent television interview.
But from the narrative now in the public domain, it appears that the port authorities here had not been informed of the problem when the ship entered anchorage on the night of May 19 although the local agent had the information. How true or not that is remains to be established. If emails have been deleted as alleged, it will be possible to retrieve them through the ship’s server and this has been ordered.
Events had subsequently unfolded rapidly. First a fire on hold number two was reported but Colombo was told that the fire fighting capability on board had dealt with it. Thereafter the fire reignited and winds blowing at speeds of up to 100 kilometres per hour fanned the flames. The massive effort mobilizing all available resources, including air support and fire fighting tugboats, to bring the blaze under control failed dismally.
According to international safety requirements, no dangerous cargo can be stored below deck and the nitric acid containers could not have been in the hold where the first fire was reported. Whether the leaking acid triggered the fire below remains an open question.
On top of all else, it is feared that we at risk of a massive oil spill as we stagger under the Covid pandemic Whether that will come to pass has not been made clear as this comment is being written. But we have to be prepared for the worst even with the limited resources we command. International assistance that will always be available to combat a catastrophe as big as this has already been mobilized. An Indian ship equipped for such emergencies is on standby at the scene.
The stricken vessel is reported to have been carrying about 350 tonnes of fuel on board when she arrived at the Colombo anchorage. The optimistic assessment, not yet confirmed, is that much of this would have been burnt in the massive fire that raged aboard before the ship began to sink. But pictures of what appeared to be an oil slick were beamed by at least one local television station that sent a crew to cover the sinking ship. Hopefully much of the fuel oil, if not all of it, has been destroyed in the fire.
The X-press Pearl was carrying among other cargo a large volume of plastic pellets, raw material for the plastic industry, some of which was consigned to Colombo, among other cargo like chemicals and cosmetics. Billions of these pellets have been washed ashore on our beaches and many more would yet be in the sea. Beach clearing operations have begun but how effective they would be even in the short and medium term is yet to be seen.
Dead sea creatures including turtles are being washed ashore and marine environmentalists predict vast damage that can extend to a hundred years. Fishermen fear for their livelihood. What would polluted beaches do to out tourist industry? It is unlikely that even if we are compensated in billions by insurers, as is being freely claimed, that this country can never again be what it was before the disaster. There is no escaping the reality that a long tough haul lies ahead.
Editorial
Coal giant awakes, but uncertainty prevails

Saturday 15th February, 2025
The Norochcholai coal-fired power plant, which came to a standstill on Sunday due to an emergency grid shutdown across the country, shuddered back into life yesterday, feeding the starved grid. The Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) announced that there would be no more power cuts. The public, troubled by planned power outages, which are as problematic as unplanned ones, must have heaved a sigh of relief. However, there is no guarantee that the problems that caused the Norochcholai plant shutdown will not recur, for their root causes have not been eliminated.
Minister Kumara Jayakody, who is in charge of the power sector, blamed Sunday’s countrywide power failure on an unfortunate monkey that caused a short circuit at a grid substation in Panadura by touching a transformer and dying in the process. The CEB said a cascading safety shutdown had led to the Norochcholai plant failure. A group of CEB engineers claimed that a steep increase in the solar power generation and a drop in the demand for power on Sunday had rendered the national grid unstable and caused a countrywide blackout. There are still many monkeys around grid substations, and solar power continues to be generated with the demand for power remaining low on Sunday. So, the possibility of another countrywide power failure occurring tomorrow or later cannot be ruled out.
Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa, speaking in Parliament, yesterday, asked Minister Jayakody to inform the House whether the CEB would be able to ensure an uninterrupted power supply tomorrow, given the low demand for electricity on Sundays. But Leader of the House and Minister Bimal Ratnayake, true to form, sprang to his feet, insisting that yesterday’s special parliamentary session had been summoned for the Supreme Court determination on the Local Authorities (Special Provisions) Bill to be announced, and therefore the Opposition should stick to the order paper. The Opposition argued that yesterday’s parliamentary sitting had cost the public millions of rupees, and therefore serious problems affecting them had to be discussed in the House. Minister Jayakody however refused to be drawn in. The government members’ protests and/or silence are not going to solve the problems in the power sector.
The CEB should explain why it has not adopted technological solutions to the problems that cause system shutdowns, especially the Norochcholai power plant breakdowns, which lead to scheduled power cuts. What one gathers from views expressed by power sector experts on Sunday’s nationwide blackout is that it is possible to prevent the Norochcholai plant shutdown with the help of a power infrastructure upgrade. Technological solutions are available, they insist. Is it that the CEB has not adopted them because the CEB has to buy power from oil-fired power plants at exorbitant rates when the Norochcholai power station shuts down? The latest Norochcholai plant failure is believed to have cost the country Rs. 1.2 billion extra a day to keep the grid running. Has anyone laughed all the way to the bank?
The CEB’s losses are conveniently passed on to the public. Hence the need for a high-level probe to find out what really caused Sunday’s power failure and the shutdown of the coal-fired power plant, and whether some vested interests undermined the national grid, as claimed in some quarters.
It is also possible that the so-called oil and coal lobbies are trying to discourage solar power production to advance their own interests. This angle of the issue of power failures must not go uninvestigated. Curiously, a claim is being floated that a fire that destroyed a factory in Horana on Thursday had been triggered by a solar panel that caught fire due to the prevailing dry spell and intense heat. Is it also part of the ongoing campaign against power generation from renewable energy sources?
Problems in the power sector are too complex and serious to be tackled in an ad hoc manner. They must be properly identified before remedies are attempted. A thorough, systematic approach is called for. We suggest that a special presidential commission of inquiry be appointed to investigate unresolved issues, allegations of malpractices, etc., in the power sector, which is Sri Lanka’s Augean Stables.
Editorial
Mini polls finally within sight!

Friday 14th February, 2025
Speaker Dr. Jagath Wickramaratne is scheduled to announce the Supreme Court (SC) determination on the Local Authorities Elections (Special Provisions) Bill in Parliament, today. He was expected to do so last week, but he stated that he had not received any communication from the apex court, by that time, regarding its determination in question. The Opposition created quite a stir, making various allegations, but the Speaker stood his ground. The rumour mill went into overdrive, alleging that the government was attempting to postpone the LG polls.
The process of ratifying the LG elections Bill will get underway after the Speaker’s much-awaited announcement. It is heartening that the LG authorities will cease to be under Special Commissioners appointed by the Provincial Governors, who report directly to the President. Since 2022, when the LG polls were first postponed, three Presidents, including an unelected one, have effectively run one-man shows by keeping all three tiers of government—Parliament, the Provincial Councils (PCs) and the LG authorities—under their thumbs. They have controlled the PCs and the LG bodies by appointing their cronies as Governors. This anomaly has eroded public trust in the electoral process to a considerable extent.
Elections must not be postponed. All political parties represented in the current Parliament have committed the cardinal political sin of putting off elections or helping governments to do so. In 2017, the UNP-led Yahapalana government presented a Bill to amend the Provincial Council Elections Act to postpone the PC polls, and it was passed unanimously! The JVP backed that administration to the hilt, going so far as to prop it up after the SLFP’s breakaway in October 2018. The SLPP government under President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s stewardship put off the LG elections in 2022 for fear of suffering a midterm electoral setback. It misused the powers vested in the Minister of Local Government to do so. That administration under Ranil Wickremesinghe’s presidency again postponed the LG polls the following year for the same reason. President Wickremesinghe claimed that funds could not be allocated for elections due to his government’s pecuniary woes.
Now, thanks to an SC intervention, the much-delayed LG polls will have to be held expeditiously. However, there are some legal and political issues that need to be sorted out. The bill seeking to amend the LG laws has to be passed by Parliament for nominations to be called afresh. Some of those who were nominated to contest the LG polls in 2023 have entered Parliament or left the country.
Meanwhile, a group of politicians representing the Opposition yesterday urged the EC to ensure that the upcoming budget debate would not stand in the way of their LG election campaigns. They said the government was planning to use the budget debate to confine the Opposition MPs to Parliament in the run-up to the LG polls. They also asked the EC to refund the deposits made by their candidates who were to contest the LG polls, which were postponed. They told the media afterwards that their parties were cash-strapped unlike the JVP-led NPP, which received as much as Rs. 50 million a month as its MPs’ salaries. One could argue that what the NPP MPs do with their own salaries is their personal business, and should not concern the Opposition.
The Opposition has reportedly requested the EC to hold the LG polls after the traditional New Year in April so that there will be ample time for its MPs to take part in their parties’ election campaigns.
The EC ought to heed the Opposition’s concerns and create a level playing field. It has done commendably well so far, and we believe that it will live up to its reputation.
Editorial
Groping in the dark

Thursday 13th February, 2025
Sri Lanka continues to be in the throes of multiple crises because their root causes usually go unaddressed. If the past governments, especially the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration, had cared to tackle the issue of the country’s national debt becoming unmanageable by taking steps to shore up foreign currency reserves and increasing state revenue substantially, the current economic crisis could have been averted.
A mega crisis has been developing in the power sector for decades, but nobody seems to care. Successive governments have only paid lip service to the pressing need to address it. Sunday’s countrywide power outage has left the government, the Opposition, the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) and other stakeholders behaving like the proverbial visually-impaired men who tried to figure out the shape of an elephant by touching different parts of the animal’s anatomy, and came to absurd conclusions. No sooner had the power failure occurred than Minister in charge of the power sector, Kumara Jayakody, declared that a monkey had done it! His claim had the whole world in stitches, with international media giving it much prominence owing to its high entertainment value. It also made one wonder whether Sri Lanka’s national grid was so primitive that it lacked resilience to withstand the shock from a monkey coming into contact with a transformer in a grid substation. Even ferocious Tigers could not shut down the national grid despite all their terror attacks on the country’s power infrastructure.
Senior CEB engineers lost no time in attributing Sunday’s power outage to an increase in solar power generation, which, they said, had rendered the national grid unstable on account of a drop in demand. That sounded a tall tale and betrayed the engineers’ prejudice against power generation from renewable sources. The CEB Technological Engineers Union has rubbished the engineers’ claim; it has said that according to a report prepared by a committee consisting of 35 experts including some of the serving CEB high-rankers, the national grid is capable of accommodating 2,600 MW of power from renewable sources, and solar power production amounts to only 1,400 MW at present. The CEB stands accused of short-changing the solar power producers in a bid to perpetuate the country’s overdependence on lucrative thermal power production. It will be interesting to see what the CEB engineers have to say about the aforesaid expert committee report.
There have been several previous instances where we experienced countrywide power outages that lasted for hours. During the past decade or so, every regime change has been followed by a nationwide power failure. The UNP-led UNF formed the Yahapalana government in 2015 after ousting the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration, and a countrywide blackout occurred in 2016. Grid defects were blamed for the eight-hour power outage, but no action was taken to find out what had really caused it.
The SLPP toppled the Yahapalana administration, and formed a government by winning the 2019 presidential election and the 2020 parliamentary polls; the country experienced a nationwide power failure in 2021. The issue was relegated to the limbo of forgotten things after the restoration of power supply and some half-hearted attempts to identify the causes thereof. Prolonged power cuts came thereafter for want of fuel to generate electricity.
Another countrywide power failure was experienced in 2023 about one year after the ouster of President Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe’s fortuitous elevation to the presidency. The latest nationwide power outage has come only a few months after a regime change.
Sunday’s power failure must be thoroughly probed and the causative factors identified as a national priority. It must also be ascertained whether some vested interests deliberately undermined the national grid to advance their own interests. Given the existence of various powerful lobbies, popularly known as Mafias, in Sri Lanka’s power sector, anything is possible.
The government should give serious thought to launching a clean-up of the power sector, which is rotten to the core, under its Clean Sri Lanka initiative.
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