Fire car ship has been raging for six days: batteries of electric cars continue to burn

Last Wednesday, some crew members of the car carrier Felicity Age noticed a plume of smoke from the hold. The ship was en route from Europe to Davesville in the United States and was off the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores. The hold was fully loaded with 4,000 VW Group cars, including 1,100 Porsches and 189 luxury Bentleys. The 22 crew members quickly realized that extinguishing was impossible and left the ship. They were picked up by a tanker sailing nearby. The crew was then flown by helicopter to the Azores by the Portuguese Navy.

Six days after fire broke out on the ship, the fire is still raging. This is due to the large amount of electric cars on board – including ID3s, e-Trons and electric Porsches. If a large lithium-ion battery catches fire, it is very difficult to extinguish. Normally, the fire brigade submerges a burning electric car in a container of water. That’s impossible if the car is on a ship in the middle of the ocean, and in a spacious bumper to bumper with other electric cars burning.

Spontaneous ignition

It is not yet known what caused the fire. There is a real chance that it is an electric car that spontaneously caught fire. A week and a half ago, an ID3 caught fire in the parking garage of the building where De Standaard is located.

“The fire continues because of the batteries that are still burning,” a spokesperson for the Dutch Boskalis confirmed to The Wall Street Journal. Boskalis subsidiary Smit is in charge of the extinguishing works and the towing of the Felicity Age. Boskalis was the company that unloaded the Ever Given in the Suez Canal. The Boskalis spokesman said it is too early to determine how to extinguish the burning cars and how to prevent the ship from sinking.

Productieachterstand

The fire is again not good news for the car sector. For a concern like VW, the disaster comes at a time when it is already struggling with shortages of parts. If 4,000 cars are lost in a ship fire, that will only increase the production backlog. For a brand like Porsche, the 1,100 cars represent about 0.3 percent of the annual production (300,000 cars per year).

It also raises questions about the safety of the electric car. If the cause is a spontaneous ignition, it cannot be ruled out that such fires will still occur on car ships. The ships must be extra secured for this. For large container ships, too, the question arises whether they are easy to extinguish if one of the stacked containers on the upper deck (which is difficult for the sprinklers to reach) catches fire and spreads to other containers.

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