A blaze on a cargo ship carrying nearly 3,000 vehicles off the Dutch coast has killed one person and injured several others, with coastguards warning that the fire could last for several days.
The fire began on Tuesday night on the 199-metre Panama-registered Fremantle Highway, which was en route from Germany to Egypt. Several crew members were forced to jump overboard.
The ship’s owner said an electric car in the cargo was suspected as a possible cause for the blaze.
In a statement, Shoei Kisen Kaisha Ltd said: “We are now trying to extinguish the fire in cooperation with the local authorities of [the] Netherlands, the salvor and the ship management company.”
The company told the NOS public broadcaster there was “a good chance that the fire started with electric cars”, of which about 25 were on board. “But we are not entirely sure of the cause, we are waiting for the investigation,” it said.
Rescue ships were spraying water on to the burning vessel to cool it down, but using too much water risked its sinking, the Dutch coastguard said. A salvage vessel was hooked on to stop the ship from drifting.
“The fire could still burn for days,” a coastguard official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP. “The ship is being cooled to keep it stable. Only the side of the ship is being sprayed, not the deck.”
The coastguard said the Fremantle Highway, which had left from the port of Bremerhaven, had been towed out of shipping lanes and could sink. It is now close to Ameland, one of four ecologically sensitive Frisian islands, situated in the Waddenzee area just north of the Dutch mainland.
The area has been declared a Unesco world heritage site and has a rich diversity of more than 10,000 aquatic and terrestrial species. This includes more than 140 species of fish, of which about 20 spend their entire life in the tidal areas along the islands’ famous mud flats.
Should the Fremantle Highway sink, “it would be a disaster of the highest order”, the daily tabloid De Telegraaf said.
Willard Molenaar, of the Royal Dutch Rescue Company (KNRM), who was among the first at the scene, said the fire had spread so quickly that seven crew members had jumped overboard.
Molenaar told NOS some people were injured making the long jump into the water, while one crew member had died in the flames. “There was lot of smoke and the fire spread quickly, much faster than expected,” he said. “The people on board had to get off quickly … We fished them out of the water.”
A helicopter airlifted the remaining people from the 23-strong crew off the burning ship. The injured crew were being treated for breathing problems, burns, and broken bones, local Dutch authorities said.
Edwin Granneman, a coastguard spokesperson, said salvage experts were trying to work out next steps for the burning boat.
The fire was the latest of several in recent times on car carriers. Earlier this month, two New Jersey firefighters were killed and five injured battling a blaze on a cargo ship carrying hundreds of vehicles, while another fire destroyed thousands of luxury cars on a ship off the coast of Portugal’s Azores islands in February last year.
