Fire on ship carrying EVs forces evacuation after blaze reignites
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It's another case of EVs morphing into infernos, a chronic safety and public relations headache for the fast-growing industry.
Although the initial cause is not yet known, fire safety experts said the presence of so many vehicle batteries on board would almost certainly worsen the situation beyond what the cargo ship's fire suppression systems could reasonably handle.
The incident 'does sound consistent with a failure in electric vehicles, especially the deployment of the CO2 system and the reignition,' said Sean DeCrane, a director with the International Association of Fire Fighters.
EV fires are notoriously hard to put out, resisting the effects of traditional foam-based fire extinguishers and small amounts of water. This is because battery fires spread through the excessive accumulation of heat from one battery cell to another, and from one battery to the next, said Rich Meier of Florida-based Meier Fire Investigation.
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Permanently extinguishing this sort of fire, according to experts, requires lowering the heat; a carbon dioxide-based system like the one used on the Morning Midas would have starved the fire of oxygen and prevented it from spreading to other materials, but it wouldn't have stopped the batteries from overheating. There is also the potential for battery fires to spread from one EV to another in a chain reaction, Meier said.
'The prevailing wisdom is that it takes 10,000 gallons of water to put out a single lithium-ion EV fire. … When you multiply that by the number of vehicles on a ship, you may sink the ship before you put the fire out,' Meier said.
Dousing the ship with seawater also presents problems, experts have said, because salt water is known to have corrosive effects, raising the risk of a short-circuits elsewhere on the ship.
The company said all 22 crew members are safe and accounted for, with no reports of injuries. A tugboat has been deployed to salvage the ship.
'Our priorities are to ensure the continued safety of the crew and protect the marine environment,' Zodiac Maritime said in its statement.
The Morning Midas fire is at least the third ship fire in recent years involving a vehicle carrier. In 2022, a cargo ship had to be abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean, with all crew members safely evacuating as luxury cars burned onboard. In a 2023 fire, one person was killed and six injured on a ship carrying nearly 3,000 vehicles.
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