Expert on freighters at the North Sea: “Fire is sort of impossible to extinguish”

Ameland (Netherlands) – The freighter “Fremantle Highway” has been on fire for the reason that early hours of the morning and will capsize with 2857 automobiles. An environmental disaster is imminent, every minute counts for the Havariekommando!

The Dutch Coast Guard announced that the hearth deliver may want to burn for days and the salvage could take a few days.

“Fighting out a deliver hearth is the top. On the road you may carry the burning e-vehicle right into a water box with a crane and cool it down. In the case of car park fires, garages or, like right here, on a deliver, electric motors cause us severe problems,” says Tobias Thiele (47), spokesman for the German fire brigade union to BILD. “If several cars are on hearth next to each different, the fireplace will become nearly impossible to extinguish due to the fact we can't get to the battery and can't cool it.”

The trouble with the fire is the strength source, i.E. The battery itself: “It is usually the supply of the hearth in an electric powered car. A everyday automobile can be extinguished without any problems, due to the fact the plastic, the rubber, the steel burns. A battery is a self-contained device, it's far encapsulated – you can not get to the supply of the hearth. All you can do is cool them down as great you could.”

This is where you'll discover content from Twitter

In order to have interaction with or display content material from Twitter and different social networks, we need your consent.

An emergency command is on duty: a tug holds the hearth freighter in position, while the Dutch rescue ship “Guardian” and a German hearth-preventing deliver cool the burning freighter.

A tug holds the lightship in position,  fireships cool its hull

“We are talking approximately temperatures of round 800 ranges. The warmness accumulates, gets oxygen time and again, for the reason that shipment deliver isn't always hermetically sealed like e.G. B. A box, “explains fireplace department spokesman Thiele. “The most effective manner to get this sort of hearth underneath control might be to flood the freighter for a short time. But then he might perish. That could be an environmental catastrophe considering the quantity of motors and the oil and the marine oil itself.”

Specialists on board the “Guardian” are currently thinking about a way to tow the auto freighter out of the hazard sector.