Cargo ship carrying burning lithium-ion batteries reaches Alaska, but kept offshore for safety
A large cargo ship with a fire in its hold is being kept 2 miles (3.22 kilometers) offshore of an Alaska port as a precaution while efforts are undertaken to extinguish the flames, the U.S. Coast Guard said Saturday.
There were no injuries to the 19 crew members aboard the Genius Star XI, which was carrying a load of lithium-ion batteries across the Pacific Ocean, from Vietnam to San Diego, the guard’s Alaska district said in a release.
The fire started on Christmas Day in cargo hold No. 1, a spokesperson for ship owner Wisdom Marine Group said in a statement. The crew released carbon dioxide into the hold and sealed it over concerns of an explosion.
Ship’s personnel alerted the Coast Guard early Thursday morning about the fire. The Coast Guard said it diverted the 410-foot (125-meter) cargo ship to Dutch Harbor, one of the nation’s busiest fishing ports located in Unalaska, an Aleutian Islands community about 800 miles (1,287 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage.
Dumping it in water will not stop it from burning, and will probably make things a lot worse for the crew.
If they could dump it overboard they absolutely would not care whether it continues to burn.
I think you mistake how much people like a steady paycheck and want to do their jobs how they're supposed to be done.
I mean sure, if tossing it into the ocean as a last resort is in the SOP and we had MSDS saying go ahead as long as you can get three miles away...
I think you mistake how companies work.
When there's many millions of dollars on the line and you're an easily replaceable deck hand the SOP is to do whatever the fuck the special consultant tells you to do.
If the container would melt and need dumping, then it would likely melt throught the ship hull as well if not jettisoned.
And then every other polutant on board is in play as well as the lithium fire.
So dumping the container is probably the least damage scenario of the things are out of control scenarios.
I believe that lithium ion and lithium iron phosphate fires are generally put out by lowering the temperature of the reaction to the point that it can't self sustain. Dumping it overboard in a vast supply of frigid water actually would put it out, provided it sinks.
It's also a really really bad idea environmentally.
Nah, someone already commented that they've towed it outside of the environment.
I applaud them for doing that before the front fell off this time. Hope they don't encounter any waves out there.
Oh, yeah. At sea? Chance in a million!
Wouldn't the sodium contents of the sea react explosively though? I was under the understanding that batteries + salt is a super bad combination
I don't have a definitive answer for that, even good Google results evade me. What I do know is that lithium batteries, lithium ion batteries, and lithium phosphate batteries are all slightly different things with different material properties.
You are in the right for thinking that elemental lithium batteries are generally very reactive to water, and air for that matter. But I know that lithium phosphate fires, which are the batteries that power most electric cars, have to be cooled with a lot of water to try to stop the reaction. I also recently saw a technique for conserving water when putting out an electric vehicle fire, it was to crane it into essentially a shipping container full of water.
So while I know lithium + water = bad, and lithium phosphate + water = ok for quenching, I actually can't find any definitive results for lithium ion + water. I'm also assuming that the ship is carrying just lithium ion or lithium phosphate batteries, since they are by far the most common. (After going back and rereading the title, it seems ion alone)
thank you for the answer, I to tried consulting the almighty google which brought no good luck either!
That is not the point. The company has to evaluate if cleaning up properly costs more than the fines of dumping the cargo in the sea. They don't care about the batteries anymore, they just want to minimize losses.
According to the article it is near a major fishing area (Dutch Harbor), so dumping those batteries will do extra damage.
But on the positive side, the electric eel population will get a much needed boost