Fire on ship carrying EVs forces evacuation after blaze reignites
A fire aboard a cargo ship carrying hundreds of electric vehicles this week burned so stubbornly that the vessel en route from China to Mexico had to be evacuated after the fire suppression system ran out of carbon dioxide and the blaze restarted, officials said.
The ship, called the Morning Midas, was in the Pacific Ocean about 1,200 miles from Anchorage when crew members saw smoke in a section of the vessel containing EVs, according to an emailed statement from Zodiac Maritime, the ship’s London-based manager. The ship is carrying roughly 3,000 vehicles, including 800 EVs, the company said.
The crew tried to put out the fire, but it reignited after the CO2 used in the ship’s firefighting system was exhausted, according to Steve Roth, chief of media relations for the Coast Guard. The boat was still ablaze as of midmorning Wednesday, Roth said.
It’s another case of EVs morphing into infernos, a chronic safety and public relations headache for the fast-growing industry.
Although the initial cause is not yet known, fire safety experts said the presence of so many vehicle batteries onboard would almost certainly worsen the situation beyond what the cargo ship’s fire suppression systems could reasonably handle.
The incident “does sound consistent with a failure in electric vehicles, especially the deployment of the CO2 system and the reignition,” said Sean DeCrane, a director with the International Association of Fire Fighters.
EV fires are notoriously hard to put out, resisting the effects of traditional foam-based fire extinguishers and small amounts water. This is because battery fires spread through the excessive accumulation of heat from one battery cell to another, and from one battery to the next, said Rich Meier of Florida-based Meier Fire Investigation.
Permanently extinguishing this sort of fire, according to experts, requires lowering the heat; a carbon dioxide-based system like the one used on the Morning Midas would have starved the fire of oxygen and prevented it from spreading to other materials, but it wouldn’t have stopped the batteries from overheating. There is also the potential for battery fires to spread from one EV to another in a chain reaction, Meier said.
“The prevailing wisdom is that it takes 10,000 gallons of water to put out single lithium-ion EV fire. … When you multiply that by the number of vehicles on a ship, you may sink the ship before you put the fire out,” Meier said.
The company said all 22 crew members are safe and accounted for, with no reports of injuries, and a tugboat has been deployed to salvage the ship.
“Our priorities are to ensure the continued safety of the crew and protect the marine environment,” Zodiac Maritime said in its statement.
It’s at least the third ship fire in recent years involving a vehicle carrier. In 2022, a cargo ship had to be abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean, with all crew members safely evacuating as luxury cars burned onboard. In a 2023 fire, one person was killed and six injured on a ship carrying nearly 3,000 vehicles.