In what could be a reality in the era of electric cars, firefighters are struggling to put out a fire that broke out on Wednesday on a vessel carrying thousands of luxury cars, which is adrift off the coast of Portugal’s Azores islands, a port official said, adding it was unclear when they would succeed.
The Felicity Ace ship, carrying about 3,965 vehicles (based on an internal Volkswagen email) including Porsches, Audis and Bentleys, some electric with lithium-ion batteries, caught fire near the coast of the Azores on Wednesday. The 22 crew members on board were evacuated on the same day.
“The intervention (to put out the blaze) has to be done very slowly,” João Mendes Cabeças, captain of the nearest port in the Azorean island of Faial, told Reuters late on Saturday. “It will take a while.”
Lithium-ion batteries in the electric vehicles on board are “keeping the fire alive,” Cabeças said, adding that specialist equipment to extinguish it was on the way.
It was not clear whether the batteries sparked the fire.
Cabeças previously said that “everything was on fire about five meters above the water line” and the blaze was still far from the ship’s fuel tanks. It is getting closer, he said.
“The fire spread further down,” he said, explaining that teams could only tackle the fire from outside by cooling down the ship’s structure as it was too dangerous to go on board.
They also cannot use water because adding weight to the ship could make it more unstable, and traditional water extinguishers do not stop lithium-ion batteries from burning, Cabeças said.
According to firefighters, a regular internal combustion engine (ICE) car requires around 750 gallons or about 2,839 liters to snuff out the blaze. By Tesla’s own estimates, its own Model S requires 3,000 gallons or 11,356 liters—that’s 4 times the amount of water.
With a report from Automotive News.
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