Reuters is reporting that the fire, which swept through the car carrier Felicity Ace carrying thousands of luxury cars, leaving it adrift off Portugal’s Azores islands has lost its intensity, probably because there is little left to burn, a port official said.
The Felicity Ace, carrying around 4,000 vehicles including Porsches, Audis, and Bentleys, some electric with lithium-ion batteries, caught fire in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday.
“The fire has subsided in recent hours,” João Mendes Cabeças, captain of the nearest port in the Azorean island of Faial, told Lusa news agency, saying there was probably little combustible material left to burn.
Cabeças told Reuters over the weekend lithium-ion batteries in the electric vehicles were “keeping the fire alive”, adding that specialist equipment was required to extinguish it. It was not clear whether the batteries sparked the fire.
Car carrier fires, particularly involving lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles, can be especially difficult to extinguish. Lithium-ion batteries may catch fire if damaged or due to a manufacturing flaw and can burn extremely hot. Firefighters have found that they needed to flow large amounts of water on the batteries because fire kept flaring up even after it appeared to be extinguished.
On average, electric vehicles are far less likely to catch fire than gasoline-powered cars. Recent analysis suggests that electric vehicles suffer 25 fires per 100,000, as compared to 1,529 fires per 100,000 vehicles. Hybrids, with both batteries and gasoline engines, have the highest rate of fires at 3,474 fires per 100,000.
One danger in fighting a car carrier fire is that the water used to extinguish the blaze can easily destabilize the ship, resulting in a capsize. This is the case in most ship fires but is especially true with car carriers, which tend to be stability constrained.
Several car carriers have capsized due to inadequate stability in normal operations. The most recent example being the Golden Ray, which lost stability and rolled on its side in St. Simons Sound near the Port of Brunswick in Georgia, due to an error in a stability calculation prior to sailing.
Unlike gasoline powered-car owners
Electric vehicle owners are more likely to post videos of their burning vehicles on social media!
GM had troubles with their diesel Cadillac and 2-4-6-8 gasoline engines, Even without social media, their customers complaints resonated in General Motors’ ivory towers..