Anchorage, Alaska – The crew of a cargo ship that transported 3,000 vehicles to Mexico, including 800 electric vehicles, the abandoned ship after they could not control a fire aboard the ship in waters in front of the chain of the Aleutiana Island of Alaska.
Initially there was a large plume of smoke in the ship’s stern from the roof loaded with electric vehicles on Tuesday, according to the photos of the United States Coast Guard and a Wednesday statement of the ship’s management company, Zodiac Maritime, based in London.
There were no injuries reported among the 22 members of the morning crew.
The crew members left the ship, were evacuated in a lifeboat and rescued by the crew of a nearby merchant ship called Cosco Hellas in the North Pacific, approximately 300 miles (490 kilometers) southwest of Adak Island. Adak is about 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) west of Anchorage, the largest city in the state.
The crew initiated emergency fire extinction procedures with the fire suppression system aboard the ship. But they could not control the flames.
“The relevant authorities have been notified, and we are working closely with emergency responders with a tugboat that unfolds to support rescue and fire extinguishing operations,” said Zodiac Maritime in a statement. “Our priorities are to guarantee the continuous safety of the crew and protect the marine environment.”
The United States Coast Guard said it sent adak air crews and a ship to the area. The state of the fire on board was unknown from Wednesday afternoon, but the smoke was still emanating from it, according to the Coast Guard.
The Admiral Megan Dean, commander of the seventeenth District of the Coast Guard, said in a statement that, as the search and rescue part of the response concluded, the Coast Guard was working with Zodiac Maritime to determine how to recover the ship and what will be done with it.
“We are grateful for the selfless actions of the three nearby ships that helped in the response and crew of the Cosco Hellas motor ship, which helped save 22 lives,” said Dean.
The morning Midas of 600 feet (183 meters), a carrier of cars and trucks, was built in 2006 and navigates under a flag of Liberia.
The cars left Yantai, China, on May 26, according to the site of the industry marinetraffic.com. They were being sent to Lázaro Cárdenas, an important port of the Pacific in Mexico.
Earl this month, a Dutchman The Security Board asked to improve the emergency response on Northern Sea shipping routes after a Mortal fire 2023 on a freighter That had 3,000 cars, including almost 500 electric vehicles, from Germany to Singapore.
That fire killed a person, injured others and burned out of control for a week, and the ship was finally towed to a port in the North of the Netherlands for the rescue.
The accident increased the focus on safety problems in the open sea and containers that fall from the massive freightersthat have increased dramatically in recent decades. More than 80% of international trade in volume now arrives by sea, and larger container ships are longer than three soccer fields.
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Baumann reported from Bellingham, Washington.
