The car transport ship carrying 3,965 new volkswagen, Porsche, Bentley and Lamborghini vehicles suffered a fire in the North Atlantic, and the open flame of the ro-ro ship that had recently been hit by the fire has been extinguished, and the fire burned on the ship's multi-deck deck. According to sources, the fire is most likely triggered by an electric vehicle loaded with lithium-ion batteries, but the final news may need to be finalized by the fire department.
Since the fire is in the Ro-Ro ship, the survey after the fire is more difficult, which is also due to the design of the Ro-Ro ship, the Ro-Ro ship refers to the special ship that uses the Ro-Ro method to load and unload the vehicle through the springboard, and the inter-deck cabins above the main deck of the Ro-Ro ship are all longitudinal structural forms without transverse bulkheads, and are flat deck type, without beam arches, so as to facilitate the use of ro-ro to load and unload various goods, also known as opening up and down the ship. The entrance and exit of the ro-ro ship is usually located at the rear, with an articulated springboard to the shore, which is used for ro-ro cargo disembarkation and disembarkation.
According to statistics, since 2002, there have been a total of 8 major accidents in vehicles shipped by Ro-Ro ships, with an average of 1 per two and a half years. It seems that the risk of loading vehicles by ro-ro ships is relatively high, and here we will give you a look at these 8 major accidents involving ro-ro ships.
In 2002, a ro-ro vessel called the Tricolor was sunk in the English Channel, carrying 2,871 BMW, Volvo and Saab cars. The wreck is located in shallow waters and poses a significant threat to shipping in the area. The salvage operation took more than a year, using a huge chain saw set with industrial diamonds to cut the tricolor number into nine parts. In the end, all the cars loaded inside were scrapped.
In 2004, a South Korean Hyundai 105 car transport collided with an oil tanker registered in Panama near Singapore. The tanker, named MT Kaminesan, loaded with 280,000 tons of crude oil, collided and caused a 165-foot hole in the side of the Hyundai 105 vehicle transport vessel, causing the accident to sink 4,191 Hyundai and Kia vehicles and 1,000 used Japanese cars inside the Hyundai 105 carrier.
In 2006, the Cougar Ace, a motor transporter carrying 4,700 Mazda, capsized near the Aleutian Islands, and in order to save the ship from completely capsizing, it had to be balanced by water injection, and the ship was finally towed to Portland on the west coast of the United States to be corrected, but the internal Mazda cars were all scrapped.
In 2015, a freighter named Hoegh Osaka rolled over when it turned to a port off the coast of England due to balance problems with ballast water tanks and too many Range Rovers parked on the upper deck. The vessel was towed to Southampton, England, where it was changed by crane in port, but about 1,400 Range Rover, Jaguar and MINI vehicles inside the ship were largely scrapped.
In 2019, also due to the lack of ballast water on the vessel, the Golden Ray car transport ship was unstable in center of gravity, and the entire ship was in an upright state, and finally the ship capsized off the coast of Georgia, and the internal 4200 Kia and Hyundai Motors and Golden Ray car transporter were scrapped together.
Most recently, in 2022, the Felicity Ace, carrying Volkswagen, Porsche, Bentley and Lamborghini, caught fire near the Azores, 1,000 miles off the coast of Portugal.
It can be seen from this that a number of motor transport ships are due to the imbalance of the ballast water tank caused by the imbalance of the ship, which is due to the fact that the ballast water tank is clearly stipulated in international shipping, according to the International Convention on the Control and Management of Ballast Water and Sediments of Ships, ships must replace the ballast water in their cargo compartments when approaching different ports, but in order to avoid the pollution of some coastal environments by foreign ballast water containing non-native marine life, it is necessary to disinfect through ultraviolet rays.
On the Cougar Ace, which was loaded with 4,700 Mazda units in 2006, it overturned at a rate different from when pumping old water into new water, and because the Ro-Ro ship was a multi-deck full of cars, the car was fixed by a tethered rope, and if the pumping and water injection were not calculated, the ship would become top-heavy, plus the car was easier to roll, just like the Hoegh Osaka accident in 2015.
Relative to the ship capsizing, impact, fire is the most difficult to deal with at sea, that is, the U.S. warship in the dock fire can only be scrapped in the end, the fire on the ship will soon get out of control, and spread to the entire ship, because the hull has a watertight cabin and external seals, the fire boat can only use water to cool the hull, just like the Fire in Portugal Near the Polycy Ace in the sea fire, if the ship is loaded with a car, the use of watering to extinguish the fire will also cause problems such as unbalanced draft of the ship.
According to a spokesman for Volkswagen, the owner of this incident, the vehicles on the ship are basically all scrapped, and this batch of vehicles is self-insured, which means that Volkswagen will bear all losses, which will affect the delivery time of some new cars. At the same time, the fire engineer said that some new energy models were loaded on the ship, and it was not certain whether the fire was caused by new energy vehicles or fuel vehicles, but he said that compared with electric vehicles, the possibility of a fire in gasoline vehicles is much greater, but it takes a lot of external conditions to ignite gasoline vehicles, and new energy vehicles may have spontaneous combustion of battery leakage, and the same gasoline vehicles are 60 times more likely to have a fire than diesel vehicles, and the possibility of hybrid gasoline vehicles is 200 times that of electric vehicles, also in the fire alarm, Gasoline vehicles are relatively easy to extinguish, and the fire alarm of new energy vehicles is basically impossible to extinguish by watering.