Container Fire Prompts Maersk Boxship to Divert to Tenerife

The container ship Rhine Maersk was forced to make an emergency port call in the Canary Islands on Sunday after crew members detected dangerously high temperatures in several cargo containers.

Rhine Maersk was northbound on a voyage from Abidjan to Algeciras when she diverted to Tenerife, arriving at the port's eastern dock at 1020 hours Sunday. Five containers filled with charcoal (or coal) had begun to self-heat, a known storage and transport risk with these materials.

The port's emergency responders quickly put out the fire by injecting water into the affected containers and  simultaneously cooling adjacent units, averting what could have become a more serious emergency. The local fire department dispatched units as a precautionary measure, but the incident was under control by the time they arrived. 

Rhine Maersk shifted berths to Tenerife's container terminal to offload the fire-damaged boxes, and will get back under way once salvage operations are completed. 

The near-miss highlights an ongoing safety challenge in container shipping. According to insurance giant Allianz, while overall vessel losses have declined by more than 50 percent in the past decade, container ship fires remain a persistent threat, occurring on average every 60 days.

"There is clearly a problem with both misdeclared and incorrectly packaged cargo," said Captain Andrew Kinsey, Senior Marine Risk Consultant at AGCS, Allianz's maritime division, in an update last year. "Regulations and guidelines for dangerous cargo exist, but they are not being adequately enforced and adhered to."

The Rhine Maersk incident comes just months after a more serious fire aboard another Maersk vessel, the Maersk Frankfurt, off the Indian coast in July. That blaze, which took four days to extinguish and claimed the life of one crew member, began in a container and quickly spread.