Container ship fire
A recurring loss whose dominant cause is the misdeclaration of dangerous goods, and which the growing size of vessels makes impossible to extinguish.
May 20, 2021: fire breaks out aboard the X-Press Pearl off Colombo, from a nitric acid leak, and the ship eventually sinks. A modern container ship carries several thousand boxes, and the owner knows only what the shipper declared about them. The dominant cause of fires on board is inaccurate or incomplete declaration of dangerous goods. The shipper wants to avoid an extra premium, a refusal of carriage or a stowage constraint, and spot checks catch 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 often refuse access to a burning ship, which prolongs the fire at sea. The exposure therefore touches hull, cargo and the environment at once, and it engages the shipper's liability. That liability is hard in practice to recover against a distant and sometimes insolvent consignor.
On May 20, 2021, fire broke out aboard the container ship X-Press Pearl off Colombo, and the vessel eventually sank. The fire was attributed to a nitric acid leak; plastic pellets polluted tens of kilometers of Sri Lankan coastline. The fire aboard the Maersk Honam in the Arabian Sea on March 6, 2018 had already cost the lives of five crew members.
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