Felicity Ace
In mid-February, as noted at the time by Tim Bousquet, the Felicity Ace, a car carrier that sometimes calls at the Dartmouth Autoport, caught fire near the Azores.
All 22 crew members were rescued from the 650-foot long vessel which was carrying about 4,000 Volkswagen Group cars, many of them luxury brands — think Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini, Audi — as well as some non-luxury brands — VW Golf R, VW Golf GTI. The ship was en route from Emden, Germany, where Volkswagen has a factory, to Davisville, Rhode Island. Firefighting and salvage crews were able to extinguish the blaze, although it took over a week, but plans to tow the vessel to a port able to accommodate it were rendered unnecessary on March 1, when the Felicity Ace sank.
Undated photo provided by the Portuguese Navy showing smoke billowing from the burning Felicity Ace car transport.
The story caught my eye because, as you may recall, last October I went down a marine insurance rabbit hole that led me to an Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty (AGCS) webinar on “Maritime trends to watch in 2022.” One of those “trends” was the threat presented by fires on large vessels and sure enough, one of the presenters — Captain Rahul Khanna, AGCS global head of marine risk — turned up on the Skytek software company site talking about the Felicity Ace:
“RoRo and car carrier vessels, in particular, are more vulnerable to fire and stability issues than other vessels, necessitating a greater emphasis on risk management.” The internal spaces are not divided into separate sections to facilitate the carriage of automobiles, as is the case with other cargo ships. The absence of internal bulkheads can have a negative impact on fire safety, as a small fire on one vehicle or battery can quickly spread out of control. Once loading is complete, vehicles are not easily accessible.
“In the event of a fire, the large volume of air inside the open cargo decks provides a ready supply of oxygen.” “At AGCS, we take a close look at operator risk management and have collaborated with a number of companies operating ro-ro vessels to develop a robust risk management program,” he added.
Khanna’s reference to batteries is important, because some of the vehicles on the Felicity Ace (it has yet to be established how many) were electric and as the vessel was burning, its captain, Joao Mendes Cabecas, told Reuters that their lithium-ion batteries were “keeping the fire alive.”
Source: Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty webinar, September 2021
Lithium-ion fires present a real challenge to firefighters. In the wake (no pun intended) of the Felicity Ace sinking, a 2013 German Transport Ministry study on electric cars as a fire hazard for maritime transport has resurfaced and it makes for interesting reading:
In the event of a lithium ion battery catching fire, it is important to note that such a fire reaches very high temperatures, produces toxic gases and is inextinguishable. Before a battery catches fire, it will, in most cases, emit gases that can be detected with the help of special sensors. However, such sensors are currently not used on ships. To effectively prevent the battery fire from spreading, it is necessary to cool the area surrounding the fire effectively. This requires large quantities of water. Moreover, it could make sense to use high pressure water mist systems and add additives to the extinguishing water.
The volume of water necessary to extinguish an EV fire is astounding (and you can’t use sea water). Consider this account of one Tesla fire in California:
Eight firefighters ultimately spent seven hours putting out the fire. They also used up 28,000 gallons of water — an amount the department normally uses in a month. That same volume of water serves an average American home for nearly two years.
The article notes that, by way of comparison, a typical fire involving an internal combustion engine “can often be quickly put out with approximately 300 gallons of water, well within the capacity of a single fire engine.”
Flammable liquids
Other commentators, though, have advised that we not jump to conclusions about the Felicity Ace fire. Emma Sutcliffe with EV FireSafe, an Australian organization dedicated to electric vehicle fire safety, says, basically, “Not so fast“:
We don’t know how many electric vehicles are onboard the Felicity Ace, whether they were grouped together on a single vehicle deck or what their individual battery state of charge was required to be.
But if Mitsui OSK Lines Ltd were following guidelines similar to other carriers, with a sub-50% SoC, we’re potentially just seeing thousands of modern vehicles burning over a long period of time, without the additional intense & prolonged fire behaviour of EV batteries.
A scenario like this appears more likely when we compare this fire with a similar event. The Sincerity Ace, which caught fire on New Year’s Eve 2018 carrying 3500 cars, was towed back to Japan from the 9th January 2019, meaning the fire took 9-10 days to burn out.
It’s early days for stats on EV car fires, but researchers with auto insurance specialist AutoinsuranceEZ.com looked at the data for car fires in the US in 2021 and concluded that:
Hybrid vehicles actually come in number one with the most fires per 100K sales. Gas vehicles are second, and electric vehicles place third, with only 25 fires per 100K electric vehicle sales.
Based on this data, electric vehicles don’t catch fire nearly as much as the news claims. Hybrid cars seem to be the most dangerous for fires, followed by gas vehicles.
It’s probably also worth noting that there have been fires on car carriers caused by old-fashioned, “flammable liquid-powered” vehicles. In 2020, the car carrier Höegh Xiamen caught fire in Jacksonville, Florida with a cargo of 2,420 used vehicles aboard. The fire burned for over a week, injured nine firefighters and was found to have been caused by an improperly disconnected battery in a used vehicle.
Firefighters conducting exterior boundary-cooling on 5 June 2021, the day after the fire was discovered on the Höegh Xiamen. (Source: NTSB report)
Still, fires involving EVs are more dangerous for firefighters (they burn hotter and longer and emit toxic gases) who often lack training in fighting them. (This is something I have to look into locally, as more EVs appear on our roads. This CNBC report on EV fires features a couple of firefighters explaining some of the problems — like, different carmakers have different battery case designs, so there’s no one method of dealing with them should they catch fire.)
But in terms of shipping EVs, it seems the key is first, ensuring there are proper safety measures in place and second, enforcing them, neither of which are givens in the shipping industry, where carrying as many vehicles as possible and getting them on and off the vessel rapidly are the priorities.
I find these days I view all incidents involving super-large ships as evidence their era may be coming to an end. In this case, Volkswagen has said insurance will cover the cost of the lost cars, which the risk solutions company Russell has estimated at “at least” $155 million. But judging by that marine insurance webinar, insurers are getting nervous about the size of the potential losses associated with the largest vessels (the presentation included a hypothetical $4 billion loss resulting from the collision of an ultra-large container ship with a cruise ship) and when insurers get nervous, rates go up.
That, combined with our new awareness of the limits of the “just-in-time” supply chain has me thinking, once again, about this New York Times article by economist and historian Marc Levinson, author of The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Writing about the Ever Given, the container ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal, he said:
Meanwhile, the ultralarge container ships like Ever Given that have entered the world’s fleet over the past few years have made long value chains even more problematic. These vessels, some carrying as much cargo as 12,000 trucks, steam more slowly than their predecessors. The complexity of loading and unloading often puts them behind schedule, and the sheer number of boxes moved on and off a single ship tangles ports and delays deliveries.
So long-distance trade is slower and less reliable than it was two decades ago…
In globalization’s next stage, ships carrying metal boxes full of stuff will no longer be at the center of the story.
I’m pretty sure I don’t have to tell you why I consider the end of the era of “ships carrying metal boxes full of stuff” to be an issue of sufficient local interest to have devoted all of today’s Fast & Curious to it, do I, dear readers?
