Plastic pellets have also poured out from the ship’s containers, washing up on the beaches. The navy has been called out to clean the burnt wreckage and debris.

But other effects cannot be easily cleaned – or even seen. The ship was carrying a whole array of hazardous chemicals: nitric acid, used for explosives; epoxy resins, used for paints and primers; and ethanol and lead ingots, used for manufacturing vehicle batteries.

There were other products, too: caustic soda, lubricating oils, aluminium byproducts, polyethene used for grocery bags and packaging, cosmetics and even food items, according to Hemantha Withanage, an environmental scientist and executive director of the Centre for Environmental Justice in Sri Lanka.

One container, Withanage noted, is named Environmentally Harmful Substances. “What are these substances? We don’t know. Authorities haven’t told us yet,” he said. “But why are they keeping this information a secret?”

The sinking of the ship means the probable leaching of these chemicals into the ocean. “And that’s a serious risk to our ecosystem,” he said, explaining that it could lead to death and contamination of the corals, fish, turtles and other marine life that abound off the country’s coasts.