Last week, a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean, a couple hundred miles south of the Aleutian Islands, had to be abandoned due to a fire that couldn’t be contained. The ship, “Morning Midas,” was transporting vehicles, including hundreds of EVs. The ship is now adrift in the Pacific, still on fire.
A cargo ship transporting 3,000 cars was abandoned in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday after a massive fire broke out. As of Friday, the ship was still burning. The blaze may have been fueled by the vehicles’ lithium-ion batteries, which are notoriously difficult to extinguish once ignited.
The ship, named Morning Midas, was reportedly carrying 3,000 cars on a journey from Yantai, China to Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico. Of those vehicles, about 750 were fully electric or partial hybrids, powered at least in part by large lithium ion batteries that can short circuit and ignite extremely hot fires.
Aside from the risk of an uncontainable fire on a ship at sea, there is the mounting problem of the cost to insurers of ships that keep getting destroyed, as well as the value of the destroyed cargo.
There is also a nasty environmental impact. As Darren of Plymouth documented at Twitter, ”The Morning Midas cargo ship, carrying electric cars from China to Mexico, is on fire and abandoned, a potential highly toxic floating lithium bomb. Burning EV batteries release dangerous chemicals including hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen cyanide, as well as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and methane. These leach into the environment. This is the green movement so many worship in action. This vessel will continue to burn until it sinks.”
These electric vehicle fires at sea are establishing a pattern. At least no crew members died in the Morning Midas fire. A crew member on the Fremantle Highway was not so lucky two years ago, dying in that EV-fueled fire.
A fire broke out on the Fremantle Highway on July 25, 2023, shortly after the vessel left Germany loaded with approximately 3,800 vehicles including up to 55 electric vehicles. One crewmember died in a poorly organized evacuation of the vessel, but the others made it to safety in the Netherlands. The fire burned for a week before the vessel was brought to Eemshaven and later to Rotterdam for the salvage operation.
Another ship, the Felicity Ace also had to be abandoned at sea in 2022 because of an EV-fueled fire. The abandoned ship eventually sank, carrying with it a stewpot of toxic chemicals to poison the seabed below, and also carrying with it a load of electric vehicles and luxury cars, including Porsches and Bentleys.
Thousands of cars, lithium-ion batteries, oil, gas, and an entire cargo ship now litter the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. On March 1, the car carrier Felicity Ace sank beneath the waves near the Portuguese Azores archipelago. Now, ecologists are worried that pollution from the wreck will impact the rich undersea environment the carrier has invaded.
At what point do shipping companies finally start refusing to transport these lithium ordnance devices?
[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]