Dutch authorities continue Wednesday, July 26, to fight a fire aboard the freighter Fremantle Highway, off the Dutch island of Ameland, in the north of the Netherlands. The fire has already caused at least one death and several injuries, and “could last for a few more days”, according to a spokeswoman for the Dutch coastguard, who specifies that the rescue team in charge of extinguishing the fire cannot not do so yet, because the ship, which was carrying cars, would not yet be stabilized.

The Fremantle Highway, an 18,500 tonne freighter, left the German port of Bremerhaven for Port Said in Egypt, according to the MarineTraffic site, which allows live monitoring of maritime traffic around the world. “We take into account all scenarios,” a Coast Guard spokesman told public radio, saying that one of the 25 electric cars on board could be the source of the explosion. fire.

Concerns for the environment

The emergency services received a call shortly after midnight reporting a fire on the Fremantle Highway, a boat registered in Panama and transporting some 3,000 vehicles, about thirty kilometers north of the Dutch island of Ameland. “The situation remains unchanged. There are still a lot of smoke fumes,” the Dutch Coast Guard said in a statement released shortly before 11:30 a.m. Two hours earlier, they had reported that “the vessel [was] still on fire” and that a rescue boat tried to control the position of the damaged cargo ship so that it did not sink.

“Several parties are working on an action plan to limit the damage,” they said, accompanying their publication with a photo of the ship from which flames and a large pile of smoke escaped. A spokesman for the mayor of the island of Ameland, Leo Pieter Stoel, expressed concern that “the environment would suffer damage if the burning freighter were to sink”.

“It’s the great fear of the islands, that something happens on one of the shipping channels that could harm the environment,” he added, as quoted by Dutch news agency Algemeen. Nederlands Persbureau (ANP).

One dead and several injured

All twenty-three crew members have now been evacuated from the boat, according to the Coast Guard. “The crew attempted to extinguish the fire themselves, but failed. Alas one person died and several others were injured,” according to the Coast Guard.

At least seven crew members jumped overboard and were picked up from the water, while the others were rescued by helicopter. The authorities of the province of Drenthe (North-East) specified that the injured suffered “mainly from respiratory problems” and were transported to hospitals in the region.

Specialized firefighters had been called from Rotterdam to be transported to the scene by helicopter. But the fire grew so fast that it was not possible to let them on board. A tug, however, managed to attach a cable to the vessel in distress to prevent it from drifting and blocking an important shipping route to Germany, according to public radio Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS).

Over 10,000 aquatic and terrestrial species

The island of Ameland, near which the Fremantle Highway is located, is one of the four Frisian islands located in the Wadden Sea in the north of the Netherlands. The area has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and boasts a rich diversity of over 10,000 aquatic and terrestrial species. “We don’t want to speculate yet but of course, like everyone else, we are worried,” ecologist Ellen Kuipers, from the environmental protection organization Waddenvereniging, told AFP.

In early 2019, some 340 containers from one of the largest container ships in the world, hit by a storm, had fallen into the water in the region, strewing kilometers of virgin coastline with plastic and polystyrene.

The worst recent disaster off the busy Dutch coast was in December 2012, when the freighter Baltic Ice, which was also carrying cars, collided with a container ship and sank. Eleven sailors had been killed.

In February 2022, the cargo ship Felicity Ace, carrying 4,000 high-end Volkswagen Group vehicles with an estimated value of between 400 and 500 million dollars, caught fire before sinking off the Azores archipelago.

“Thermal Runaway” Phenomenon

The fires of cars equipped with electric batteries are not a priori more frequent or dangerous than those of gasoline cars, assures the National Association of protection against fires (NFPA), the American organization in charge of the question. It usually takes a lot more water to extinguish them, and it is also common for batteries to catch fire again several hours or even days after the initial incident, due to a phenomenon called “thermal runaway”. which can occur in damaged lithium-ion batteries.

On board a boat, this “thermal runaway” is “virtually inevitable unless the crew intervenes immediately to control the fire”, warned the insurer Allianz in a note from August 2022. “Unfortunately, this intervention is rarely possible, for lack of early enough detection, a lack of crew, and sufficient capabilities on board to fight the fire”. Especially since the cars are shuffled and squeezed by the thousands on the decks of the boat, almost bumper to bumper.

The European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) recommended in 2022 to train sailors and identify cars by fuel, with stickers for example, to spot them as quickly as possible in the holds in the event of an incident. Above all, EMSA recommends charging the batteries of electric vehicles to between 20 and 50% of their capacity only: beyond that, the risk of fire increases. Lithium batteries in electric cars contain a flammable liquid and can catch fire if they are overcharged, suffer from manufacturing defects or are subjected to high temperatures.