Burning Panama flagged ship could cause ecological disaster

Dutch authorities tried to prevent Thursday, for the second day in a row, an ecological catastrophe off its northern coast, where a Panamanian-flagged freighter with vehicles caught fire.

According to information from the Dutch coast guard, “there is still fire on board” the “Fremantle Highway”, in which a fire broke out shortly after midnight on Wednesday morning.

The boat, which is still attached to a tugboat, “drifts to the west because of the wind and current”, and is now 16 km from the island of Terschelling.

“The ship is kept out of the traffic lanes so that maritime traffic can pass at a sufficient safe distance,”.

However, the rescue boats stopped spraying water to cool the boat and thus “avoid having too much water on board”, something that “may affect its stability”, said a coast guard spokesman.

The spokesman warned that “the risk of an ecological disaster is still present,” for example if “the ship capsizes and sinks.”

The cause of the fire is unknown, but this Thursday, the Dutch authorities announced that they are participating in an investigation initiated by Panama.

According to the owner of the ship, the Japanese group Shoei Kisen Kaisha, one of the 25 electric cars that the cargo ship was carrying could have caused the fire.

Of the 23 crew members who were on board and were able to be evacuated, one sailor died and several were injured.

Authorities are concerned that the ship is close to a fragile ecosystem and the Wadden Sea, which stretches from the Netherlands to Denmark and which, with a rich diversity of more than 10,000 aquatic and terrestrial species, has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Unesco.

The Fremantle Highway ship left the German port of Bremerhaven for Port Said, in Egypt, and had about 3,000 cars on board, of which 25 were electric cars.

The crew themselves tried to control the fire, but due to its intensity, it was not possible, which led seven of them to jump off the ship in a controlled manner until the rescue services arrived and pulled them out of the water.