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.
Key points:
- The lithium-ion batteries of some election vehicles are hampering the firefighting operation
- The ship was attempting to transporting VW vehicles from a factory in Germany
- It was not clear whether the batteries sparked the fire
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.
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".
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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.
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.
