Wrecked by explosion

Jan.1931 sinking off Beruwala coast

The recent fire on the large oil tanker MT New Diamond, carrying crude oil when she was drifting about 20 nautical miles from our Eastern coast made international headlines. As the fires on the Japan-manufactured vessel, owned by a Greek shipping company, are doused by Sri Lankan authorities, Sunday Island revisits the ill-fated MV Tricolor laden with a cargo of dangerous chemicals which sank near Beruwala nearly 90 years ago, presumably making it the second deepest known shipwreck found in our waters.

by Randima Attygalle

By noon on January 5, 1931, the Norwegian owned MV Tricolor, a diesel-powered, 135-metre long, general cargo ship departed from the Colombo Port. The master of the ship was the 37-year-old Captain Arthur Johan Wold. The vessel is said to have carried a general cargo of over 825 tons including 48 tons that had come in from Hong Kong, Kobe, Yokohama and Moji which had just been loaded that morning. A significant amount of dangerous chemicals had also been in it.

The Tricolor, as the Tech Diving Expert and underwater explorer, Dharshana Jayawardena documents in his book, Ghosts of the Deep: Diving the Shipwrecks of Sri Lanka ‘was capable of 13.5 knots per hour. After the port boundary was cleared, the captain ordered full ahead. Three hours later and 65 km away from Colombo, the vessel arrived exactly atop its last resting place to be. The time was 3.10 pm that afternoon.’ As the writer goes on to record: “suddenly there were loud explosions and the ship shuddered violently. The explosions were so loud that, the crew of the French Steamer SS Porthos, which was a few kilometres away, actually heard it clearly and also saw the massive plume of smoke billowing out of the Tricolor immediately after the explosion.”

Wasting no time, the Captain of Porthos changed the course and headed towards the Tricolor to rescue the crew. Although the French vessel could rescue 31 crew members and all ten passengers, five crew members lost their lives including the 37-year-old Norwegian Captain of the ship Arthur Wold. The Captain of Porthos later recorded that Tricolor had sunk within five minutes after the explosion. The sinking was reported in the Norwegian press the following day. “As announced in a part of Norwegian Post about notice from Colombo, Ceylon that Oslo steamer Tricolor was sunk by an explosion. At this point, the information about the accident is quite sparse. According to telegraphic messages from the shipping company Wilh.Wilhelmsen, the explosion occurred shortly after Tricolor left Colombo.’

Although a substantial amount of dangerous chemicals had also been in the vessel, there are no records confirming the type of chemicals, says Jayawardena who has dived to the doomed Norwegian vessel five more times since his first dive in 2009. He further says that although chemicals are assumed to have contributed to the explosion on Tricolor, the exact cause still remains a mystery. Lying 65m deep, Tricolor is the second deepest known shipwreck found in our waters. It takes a ‘technically precise diver’ to explore the wreck and it lies beyond what is called ‘recreational diving limit’ as Jayawardena explains.

Like the MV Tricolor, the MT New Diamond, is a ship in peril. On a daily basis, all over the globe, thousands of ships are plying rough seas, carrying hazardous cargo, be it explosive chemicals (like the Tricolor), or crude oil (like the New Diamond) or highly dangerous explosives that can lead to catastrophic explosions similar to the one that happened recently in Beirut. “When a calamity of this nature happens, it is only recently that, the world has come to focus more on the environment aspect and the damage to the oceans that can come from marine traffic transporting hazardous cargo; earlier it was more focused on the human drama that surrounds a shipwreck and environmental pollution was never much of a concern in the days bygone. At the least this is a positive trend and a change of mindset. But clearly more attention is needed to take measures that can help disasters such as the MT New Diamond,” reflects Jayawardena.

When the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in Alaska in 1989, 37000 metric tons of crude oil decimated the local marine environment and that damage took decades to recover if at all. The MT New Diamond is a much larger ship, with a length of 330m as opposed to the length of Exxon Valdez which was 301m in length. “Imagine the impact to the environment if the MT New Diamond ruptures and empties its crude oil? Depending on the currents, the whole of the southern east coast and south east coast, including the shores of the Yala National park could be at risk,” says the explorer.

In May, 2013, an email from the Norwegian Olav Anders Rasting to Jayawardena, left him astounded. “In it, Rasting claimed to be the great-grandson of Arthur Wold, the captain of the doomed Tricolor! He had come across the website I founded (www.divesrilanka.com) and was anxious to know if I had any information to offer about the ship steered by his great grand-father,” recalls Jayawardena. Rasting’s father Pal Arthur Rasting’s (grandson of Captain Arthur Wold) search for any clue to the wreck had driven a blank, says Jayawardena. Captain Arthur Wold had left behind a wife and little twin children- Per Wold and his twin sister Karin Wold. Years later, Karin would name her son Pal Arthur Rasting after her father who sank with Tricolor. “82 years after the MV Tricolor sank, his great-grandson’s search for the ill-fated vessel bore fruits,” says Jayawardena.

The first glimpse of the wreck of Tricolor as the expert diver recollects is “like seeing the bow of the Titanic.” ‘Fearsome and majestic’, the ship’s deck is a “gigantic skeletal structure consisting of reams of beams” reminding him of a “massive railroad stretching as far as the eye can see”, as he documents in his book. “I can feel the raw power of true wilderness chill my bones to the core,” writes Jayawardena who was kept company by a large shoal of silvery jacks and a small school of chevron barracuda! He describes the wreck towering over him like a “gigantic monster.” His dive to the wreck three years ago enabled him to retrieve a Norwegian-made plate and also locate the ship’s twin diesel engines. He also made a video recording of the site. The location referred to as ‘Barberyn’ in certain literature is actually Beruwala as he confirms. “The vessel’s last reported location was within a kilometer from the wreck, further confirming this.”

The diver’s experience each time he dived to the Tricolor, has been different. “Sometimes the visibility is amazingly clear and the currents have been slack. On the other extreme, visibility has been low but the marine life has been prolific, especially when there is extremely strong current making it really challenging to explore the Tricolor, given it is such a large ship and at this depth, which gives an explorer only short time in each dive to explore. But each dive has been rewarding in its own way and I have made small discoveries that have added to the circumstantial evidence that this is indeed the MV Tricolor.” The wreck of MV Tricolor, as Jayawardena notes, had been explored only by a handful of divers todate. “Its depth enabling only high tech divers to access it and its location unknown to many had rendered the wreck to be outside the mainstream list of dive sites offered by dive centres in the area,” he notes.

Pic credit: Olav Anders Rasting, Ramzi Reyal, Dharshana Jayawardena