Posted on 02/20/2022 9:37:54 PM PST by george76
Firefighters are struggling to extinguish a fire that broke out last week on a cargo ship that is carrying thousands of luxury cars and is adrift off the coast of Portugal's Azores islands.
A port official said it was unclear when crews would succeed.
The vessel, Felicity Ace, which is carrying about 4,000 vehicles including Porsches, Audis and Bentleys, some electric with lithium-ion batteries, caught fire in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday.
The 22 crew members on board were evacuated on the same day.
"The intervention [to put out the blaze] has to be done very slowly," João Mendes Cabeças, captain of the nearest port in the Azorean island of Faial, said late on Saturday.
"It will take a while."
Lithium-ion batteries in the electric vehicles on board are "keeping the fire alive", Captain Cabeças said, adding that specialist equipment to extinguish it was on the way.
It was not clear whether the batteries sparked the blaze.
Volkswagen, which owns the brands, did not confirm the total number of cars on board. It said on Friday it was awaiting further information.
The ship manager did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Captain Cabeças previously said "everything was on fire about five meters above the water line" and the blaze was still far from the ship's fuel tanks. But he said is was getting closer.
"The fire spread further down," he said, explaining that teams could only tackle the fire from outside by cooling down the ship's structure because it was too dangerous to go on board.
They also could not use water because adding weight to the ship could make it more unstable, Captain Cabeças said, and traditional water extinguishers did not stop lithium-ion batteries from burning.
The Panama-flagged ship will be towed to a country in Europe or to the Bahamas. However, it is unclear when that will happen.
Smoking Tire automotive podcast host Matt Farah was told by his car dealer that the Porsche Boxster Spyder he ordered was "now adrift, possibly on fire, in the middle of the ocean".
The ship is burning from one end to the other... everything is on fire about five meters above the water line.
batteries are spontaneously combusting ..?
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/18/22940790/cargo-ship-fire-vw-porsche-lamborghini-ev-battery
All of a sudden, I can afford a luxury car! This is a good news story.
Try to imagine driving your EV home on a rainy or snowy day, parking it in a garage attached to your house, insert the recharger, tuck your kids into their beds and then go to sleep.
Light metal fires burn at such a high temperature that they suck the oxygen out of water used to douse the fire.
You can’t use water to put out a light metal fire. Light metals create nightmare fire scenarios on ships.
Or being in a airliner as had happened. Or a spacecraft...
Ill say it again- this is a warning from God to stay away from electric vehicles- clearly- j/k
What a surprise! How long until the EV proponents start flooding the thread with tanker fires?
Spray it with liquid nitrogen. Not much can stay burning with that .
Wouldn’t nitrogen pretty much instantly boil to gaseous form?
Isn’t this hulk just going to burn until it loses structural integrity and the bunker oil is released to burn on the surface?
Yep. If sprayed, liquid Nitrogen would never make it to the ship -- it would be gaseous milliseconds after it left the sprayer.
Nitrogen is 70% of the atmospheric air, so the small extra amount contributed by the spray wouldn't do much.
That said, if you -could- get liquid N2 onto the fire, it might be effective.
Do NOT charge your car in your garage overnight while everyone is asleep. Actually, charge it outside only.
Torpedo the ship and sink it.
We had a ship run aground locally, and they decided the least damage would result from burning it in place.
What kind of carbon footprint are we talking? Who cares as long as Elon keeps posting based memes!
“Spray it with liquid nitrogen.”
You know of ship born liquid nitrogen dispensing systems ?
Do tell.
(not to mention that the liquid nitrogen would immediately evaporate (if it didn’t drift back on the dispensing vessel and kill the crew))
1. Modern cars of plastic body panels, rubber tires, etc. are pretty combustible and their combustion products can be pretty toxic to firefighters.
2. EV batteries that are partially melted, being sprayed with salt water (conducting) is not a great idea, and there is not a big supply of fresh water out in the ocean to fight fires.
3. The heat generated by an EV fire is pretty significant and steel hulled/decked ships loos structural integrity at easily attainable fire temperatures.
I honestly think that the ship will be allowed to sink. I also think that world insurance industry just got a wake up call on the danger of shipping EV’s by water. That is going to put a huge cost increase into the price of EV’s.
A few months ago, the UK wrote up a regulation...to prevent black-outs in the mid-day period with people recharging their vehicles. If I remember correctly, you can only re-charge after 7 PM.
I anticipate most putting a timer situation up with the charger...probably starting after midnight. Should be an interesting period where a hundred home-fires per month is the general average for E-cars.
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