Cargo ship carrying nearly 3,000 vehicles continues burning in the ocean
A cargo ship carrying over 3,000 vehicles was still ablaze for the second day off the Dutch coast on July 27 while firemen and salvage personnel waited for the flames to go down before attempting to board the vessel. While several crew members jumped 100ft into the water to escape the fire, one of the sailors was discovered dead and 22 other crew members were injured.
The Fremantle Highway was sailing from the German port of Bremerhaven to Singapore when it caught fire soon before midnight on July 25 approximately 27 kilometers north of the Dutch island of Ameland, causing environmental concerns. Authorities said helicopters and lifeboats removed all 23 persons on board, including many injured crew members and the individual who died.
According to ship-tracking data gathered by Bloomberg, the Panama-flagged Fremantle Highway was its route to Port Said, Egypt, after a recent stop in the German port of Bremerhaven. The vessel's Japanese owner, Shoei Kisen Kaisha Ltd., stated that the cars' final destination is Singapore.
According to the Dutch coast guard official, 25 of the 2,857 automobiles on board were electric vehicles. According to Dutch news agency ANP, quoting an anonymous coast guard official, one of the EVs may have caught fire, and the inferno might linger for days.
Mercedes-Benz manufactured around 300 of the vehicles on board. Even a BMW representative acknowledged that they too had automobiles on the ship but did not specify how many.
The coast guard was unable to determine whether there was a gasoline leak from the ship, but officials took preventive measures to prevent one, according to a spokeswoman. According to Bloomberg, the 10-year-old ship, which measures around 656 feet in length, can hold up to 4,000 automobiles.
As a precaution, the Netherlands dispatched a ship equipped with special booms to control oil leaks to the region on July 26. The fire on a car-carrying cargo ship in the North Sea is not the first. A similar conflagration in a vehicle transport ship in Newark, New Jersey, took firemen nearly a week to extinguish a year ago. Two firefighters were killed, while another five were wounded.