Cargo Ship Fire (Not required)

Here's the official site from the ship's owner.

The official press statements indicate the fire is still burning, and a salvage team has not boarded the ship yet.

Here's an incident report from a firm that supplies information to insurers, including a map. They indicate that the fire started in a cargo hold, which again points to the cars themselves as the thing that's burning.

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Less official information is that the ship carried 3,965 cars, worth about $500M.

A Reuters report quoted the captain of the port in Faial, Azores, as saying that the lithium-ion batteries were “keeping the fire alive,” and that “traditional water extinguishers do not stop lithium-ion batteries from burning.”

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I'm walking back what I said about containers. That's a way to size a ship. But now that we can see the ship up close, it's clearly a drive-on-drive-off vessel, and not a container carrier.

Could not confirm what student brought up in class today: that the fire is out, and the ship is being towed to the Bahamas. I found that flames are no longer visible, and that it might be towed to the Bahamas. I wonder about that: The Bahamas is not a country known for ship salvage. These reports are coming from an interview with a harbormaster in the Azores, and I wonder how informed he really is. It's really unlikely they'd be able to handle a ship that size in the Azores though.