A recurring loss whose dominant cause is the misdeclaration of dangerous goods, and which the growing size of vessels makes impossible to extinguish.
A modern container ship carries several thousand boxes of which the owner knows only what the shipper declared. The dominant cause of fires on board is inaccurate or incomplete declaration of dangerous goods, made to avoid an extra premium, a refusal of carriage or a stowage constraint, and spot checks detect only a fraction. Three factors then turn an ignition into a total loss. On-board firefighting is sized for an earlier generation of vessels and cannot reach the heart of a stack of containers. The fire spreads through a volume whose contents are unknown, so with no suitable extinguishing strategy. And ports frequently refuse access to a burning ship, which prolongs the fire at sea. The exposure is therefore at once a hull risk, a cargo risk, an environmental risk and a shipper liability, the last being in practice hard to recover against a distant and sometimes insolvent consignor.
The fire aboard the container ship X-Press Pearl off Colombo, reported on 20 May 2021 and followed by the vessel's sinking, was attributed to a nitric acid leak and polluted tens of kilometers of Sri Lankan coastline with plastic pellets. The fire aboard the Maersk Honam in the Arabian Sea on 6 March 2018 had already cost the lives of five crew members.
container ship fire, incendie à bord, marchandises dangereuses non déclarées, misdeclared cargo