Morning Midas – a Vehicle Carrier still burning in the Pacific

Fremantle is a pivotal hub for RO-ROs – Roll-on/Roll-off vehicle carriers – facilitating the import of thousands of vehicles to Western Australia.

RO-ROs usually berth at North Quay on Berths 11 and 12, and three to five visit each week. So it was sad to see pictures of a burning RO-RO in the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday last week.

Morning Midas. Credit US Coast Guard

The Morning Midas, that was reportedly transporting 3,000 cars on a journey from Yantai, China to Mexico, caught fire and is still burning at last report. The CO2 fire suppression system apparently proved ineffective.

The 22-crew on board were unable to extinguish the fire, issued a distress call and abandoned the ship in lifeboats. A merchant navy ship rescued all sailors. A salvage team is expected to arrive soon.

Screenshot

The massive blaze may have been fueled by the electric vehicles’ lithium-ion batteries, which are notoriously difficult to extinguish once ignited. Of the vehicles on board, about 800 were fully electric (EV) or partial hybrids. Lithium-ion batteries can short-circuit and ignite.

It is very difficult to extinguish these fires, due to the phenomenon known as thermal runaway, which can take days or weeks to manifest. Once ignited, these fires and explosions burn much hotter than fires caused by traditional internal combustion engines. They often reignite after being extinguished, making them especially challenging for firefighters to manage.

Cargo ships are a perfect breeding ground for dangerous fires, with tightly packed vehicles with limited ventilation. The Morning Midas fire is the latest in a series of maritime incidents involving EVs, including the Fremantle Highway fire where the Panamanian-flagged vehicle carrier was carrying 3,783 vehicles, including 498 EVs and caught fire off the Dutch coast. The incident killed one person and injured several others, several crew jumped overboard to escape. The fire burned for days before the vessel was towed to the Dutch port of Eemshaven, for salvage operations.

In 2022, another cargo ship the Felicity Ace transporting 4,000 vehicles caught fire in the Atlantic Ocean and eventually sank.

Carmakers and battery suppliers are making efforts to improve the durability. Even with those improvements, the sheer scale of new EVs being shipped to meet global demands means fires, either on ships or our streets, and are not likely to go away anytime soon.

These incidents underscore the growing concerns regarding transportation of EVs by sea and the challenges of extinguishing EV fires at sea.

* By Jean Hudson @jeansodyssey.

Jean is our Shipping and Sailing Correspondent and also a regular feature writer and photographer here on the Shipping News. You may also like to follow up her informative Places I Love stories, as well as other feature stories and Freo Today photographs, right here.

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