A 19-year-old roll-on roll-off (ro-ro) carrier, Midnight Sun, serving the northern west coast of America and Alaska, remains at Port Tacoma after a fire broke out on its deck last Thursday evening local time.
From what is known, no seafarers were injured in the incident and the fire was extinguished by the vessel’s crew before firefighters reached the ro-ro.
The Tacoma Fire Department said “the blaze was likely caused by an electrical fire in a piece of maintenance equipment on the upper deck”.
It was also reported that the ship itself had only suffered minimal damage.
The Midnight Sun, which is responsible for trans-shipping automotive loads and oversized project cargo from Washington State to Anchorage, is the second ro-ro to catch fire this year.
In February, the Felicity Ace sank with more than 4 000 cars on board, most of them electrical and many of them luxury special-order vehicles, after it caught fire off the coast of the Azores.
For days, port and fire-fighting personnel from Portugal battled the smouldering fire emanating from the ro-ro’s hold, even calling on specialists from Rotterdam to assist with what was eventually determined to a be a chemical fire.
In 2019 another ro-ro, Al Fayrouz, was completely gutted in an on-board fire off the Farasan Islands in the Red Sea.
In the meantime, last week’s fire involving the Midnight Sun is being treated as very hush-hush.
Port authorities won’t go into too much detail except to say there was no pollution stemming from the incident and that the fire had been brought under control very quickly.
The fire apparently broke out above decks and nothing has been said about the carrier’s cargo at the time.
After the Felicity Ace sank, marine insurer Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty warned that shipping safety and insurance had become a major concern because of fires linked to lithium-ion batteries.
