The massive fire on a cargo ship that’s adrift at sea in the Atlantic Ocean and hauling thousands of luxury cars may have been intensified by the batteries in the electric vehicles on board, according to reports.
The 650-foot-long Felicity Ace which is carrying some 4,000 cars including Porsches and Bentleys caught fire in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean last Wednesday while it was on its way from Germany to the United States.
All 22 crew members on board were evacuated and rescued that day.
However, the vessel remains smoldering off the coast of Portugal’s Azores islands.
Joo Mendes Cabeas, captain of the nearest port in the Azorean island of Faial, told Reuters over the weekend that the lithium-ion batteries in the electric vehicles on board the ship were “keeping the fire alive.”
Cabeas explained that specialty equipment was needed to extinguish the blaze.
The cause of the fire was not yet clear.
“The cars are electric and part of the fire is the batteries that are still burning,” a spokesman for Royal Boskalis Westminster NV, which owns SMIT Salvage and is the company that has been contracted to salvage the ship, told The Wall Street Journal in a report published Sunday.
Meanwhile, Cabeas told the Portugal news agency Lusa on Monday that the fire has died down likely because there is not much left to burn, Reuters reported.
“The fire has subsided in recent hours,” Cabeas said, according to Reuters.
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