Another fatal RORO fire
Overnight news broke of another fatal fire on a RoRo vessel, this one on the Fremantle Highway, off the Dutch coast. One crew member has been confirmed to have died in this fire, and the vessel is currently abandoned, though still on fire. RoRos have several factors that make the particular susceptible to fires, including cargoes (used cars and increasingly electric vehicles) that serve as means of ignition, as well as large, open cargo holds that allow the fire to spread to multiple vehicles and complicate efforts to extinguish the fire. They are also very tall vessels, in the case of Fremantle Highway, early reports state that crew members were jumping into the water from the upper decks of the vessel to escape, resulting in injuries.
Since 2020, there have been several high-profile fires on different types of RoRo vessels:
Fremantle Highway - Cargo-only RoRo, July 26th 2023, One dead and numerous injuries
Grande Costa d’Avorio - Cargo-only RoRo, July 5th 2023, Two shore-based firefighters died, the vessel was loading vehicles in Newark, USA
Angara - Cargo-only RoRo, June 25 2022, Abandoned in the Sea of Japan, no deaths
Euroferry Olympia - Cargo and Passenger RoRo, January 18 2022. Eight dead, 3 missing
MV Felicity Ace - Cargo-only RoRo, February 2022. No deaths but the vessel sank in the Atlantic.
Höegh Xiame - Cargo-only RoRo, June 4 2020. Several Jacksonville shore-based firefighters injured in an incident very similar to the Grande Costa d’Avorio fire.
In a prior study, DNV noted 35 RoRo vehicle deck fires between 2005-2016, and with 25 between 1990-2003, though without normalizing these to the size of the fleet at risk, it is hard to tell if this problem is getting better or worse. However, the number of recent deaths is going to raise the pressure on the industry to study what else can be done to prevent these fires and, potentially more importantly, give the crew members more options for responding to them. Some piecemeal responses have been in process, including:
ABS announcing new RoRo rules for electric vessels
IMO’s Sub-Committee on Ship Systems and Equipment meet in Feb-March 2023 and approved tougher standards for fire detection, fires on open vehicle decks, and some improved structural fire protection. However, the regulations mainly target passenger-carrying RoRos, which is only one of the six incidents above, and are limited in scope.
Some potential issues to consider moving forward are:
Is increased detection enough? With a crew normally of 20-25 people, fire response options may be limited in large RoRo spaces when the ship is at sea. Why are fixed firefighting systems not more effective in these spaces? The record of shore-based firefighters in these spaces is also frightening; minimizing the need for humans to directly perform fire suppression is an important avenue to explore.
Given the small size of the crew on most commercial vessels, a key concept in fire protection aboard a ship is insulated fire boundaries to contain the fire in the compartment it first starts in. In the large vehicle decks, this does not seem to be working. Could better structural fire protection help and what is the weight implications of such an approach? How do electrical vehicle fires change the temperature profile of these fires, and are existing insulation standards sufficient?
How do we allow the crew to effectively evacuate these types of vessels? A key line of inquiry from Fremantle Highway should be why the crew was forced to jump from the upper decks to the water.