Speculation rife about Flaminia fire

Speculation is rife about the cause of the fire followed by an explosion which broke out on the MSC Flaminia which was under way from Charleston, US, to Antwerp, Belgium, last week. It forced the crew to abandon the ship some 1 000 nautical miles (1 900 kilometres) from the nearest land in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Undeclared dangerous goods are speculated to be the cause of the incident, although neither the owners, Conti Reederei, nor the operators, NSB Niederelbe, nor the charterers, MSC, have made any such official suggestion up to now. But, say press reports, with hundreds of combustible items around, just one such cargo item wrongly manifested and therefore loaded, could have triggered the disaster. And, if this was the case, according to Glenn Delve, marketing director of MSC in SA, it would be a classic situation – showing just how serious undeclared dangerous goods can be to a ship. Not that MSC doesn’t take strict steps to prevent such an incident. “We’ve got very stringent hazardous procedures,” he told FTW, “and our own global hazardous desk. We also have global training of our customers, because many of them don’t realise just how serious this is.” But, he added, there can be all sorts of middlemen involved in the documentation and booking of cargoes, and, if any of them accidentally fail to declare dangerous goods (often apparently innocent items that most of us have in our kitchens) then such a tragedy is just waiting to happen.