Thanks for posting that.It could be worse than just a circling ship outside of port…
Cargo Ship Full of Porsches, Bentleys and VWs Is On Fire and Adrift in the Atlantic [UPDATED]
The Felicity Ace’s crew has been rescued, but the fate of the vehicles on board is unknown.www.thedrive.com
Vehicle carriers do not have a good safety record.
The accidents and incidents can be largely grouped into 2 different cause groups - Fire and Instability.
Let’s look at fires first of all. That is now 7 major fires since January 2019 that I am aware of:
January 2019 SINCERITY ACE caught fire whilst crossing the Pacific with 3500 Nissans on board. 5 Crewman died
March 2019 GRANDE AMERICA caught fire and sank in the Bay of Biscay
May 2019 GRANDE EUROPA caught fire whilst off the Spanish coast in the Mediterranean. It had no less than 2 separate fires in brand new vehicles within the space of 4 hours.
May 2019 PLATINUM RAY Fire. Korea
June 2019 DIAMOND HIGHWAY was abandoned in the South China Sea because of a fire onboard.
June 2020 HOEGH XIAMEN caught fire whilst loading at Jacksonville Florida. Despite the fire service being on scene very quickly and using drones with IR cameras to detect hot spots, the ship continued to burn for days and was a total loss. This fire was very concerning since if a fire cannot be extinguished when alongside with the benefit of a fully equipped fire service using fire boats and all the latest technology, what chance would it have at sea?
The causation of most of these fires is put down to car batteries, that’s normal ICE 12V car batteries on brand new cars. No, I don’t suppose you read about these horrific incidents in the Daily Mail since they didn’t involve a Tesla.
The other major issue with these ships is their stability or rather potential instability.
Generally there are 2 reasons for stability issues the first of which is water ingress and the second is failing to ballast or trim the vessel properly. The latter can often lead to the former.
Typing the following incidents into a search engine will produce an eye-opening read.
Dec 02 TRICOLOR Enroute from Zeebrugge to Southampton sank following collision. Notoriously hit twice more by 2 different vessels.
Jul 06 COUGAR ACE Developed a severe list
Dec 12 BALTIC ACE 11 died following a collision
Jan 15 HOEGH OSAKA Developed a severe list. MAIB report here.
Jan 16 MODERN EXPRESS Severe list
Dec 16 GLOVIS CORONA List North Sea
Sep 19 GOLDEN RAY Capsized
The American NTSB report on the GOLDEN RAY is yet to be published, however there were some US Coastguard hearings in September from which you can get a very good idea of what went on.
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