Yes certainly container ships do have fires but most are extinguished by the
on board systems pretty fas. I can only assume that in this case it was one
of those perfect storm occasions where everything was stacked in favour of
mayhem.

Unfortunately in the world as it is with complex needs of cargo, eventually
mistakes will occur, but really in this case surely the containment system
should not have been allowed to flood a sealed area with flammable gas, it
should have been vented overboard.

Brian

--

This newsgroup posting comes to you directly from...
The Sofa of Brian Gaff...

Blind user, so no pictures please
Note this Signature is meaningless.!
"T i m" wrote in message
...
I caught the back half of a thing on TV (Quest I think) last night
where they were covering a container ship that suffered a fire then
explosion in one of it's container holds that burnt for a month.

They got the scientists in and (all from memory), they examined the
fire detection 'sniffer' pipes and found a residue of PVC. They had
(from the manifest) containers in that hold that contained PVC and
apparently it can give off hydrogen (that probably caused the
explosion(s)) but only if it gets very hot.

Then they noticed that the PVC containers had been stored close to
some containers of some unstable adhesive that was made stable (for 60
days at 18 DegC) by mixing it with a stabiliser. Even though the
containers had been stored onshore somewhere hot (27 DegC) en route
and that reduced the effect of the stabiliser to 30 days, they were
still inside that timeframe, so something else must have shortened
that time ...

Then they noticed those containers were stored close to some others
that had to be kept hot to keep the content molten and this had heated
the other containers, causing them to overheat and to heat the PVC ...

The CO2 fire extinguisher system had failed [1] and whilst it did
flood that particular hold with CO2, it also leaked into the engine
room, tripping an alarm and killing the engine (adding to the issues
at the time).

They also tried to apply water to cool it all down but the fire was
too deep in the hold and in mostly sealed containers (pre explosions
anyway). ;-(

The containers containing the volatile adhesive were put down deep
rather than stacked on the upper / outer levels because there were
designated under two 'hazards', one being the fire / explosive /
unstable nature and the other 'Risk to marine environments' and the
latter took precedence so they were positioned where they were
unlikely to go overboard (in a storm etc).

Whilst the hazard of the adhesive had been declared by the
manufacturers / shippers, no one involved in the loading of the ship
had taken note of enough of it to not put such a mix together (had
they been party to it in the first place etc).

I think three crew died trying to deal with it all. ;-(

I think the adhesive has had it's hazard classification modified so
that it can't be placed were it was again.

Apparently fires on container ships aren't that uncommon. ;-(

Cheers, T i m

[1] Apparently most / all of the other similar ships of that design /
era had the same fault in the fire suppression system.