The ship is expected to keep burning for weeks.
Actually, it might also sink and release up to 2,000 tons of heavy fuel oil (plus molten plastic, metals etc.) to the Wadden Sea which is on the UNESCO World Heritage List as an important biosphere reserve.
Nice! Good to know!
yeah, tug it back to the customers/producers.
This is also the reason why they aren’t extinguishing the fire as normal. Because flooding the boot with water will guarantee it to sink.
“Of the 3000 cars onboard, 25 are electric and one of those has apparently set light to the whole cargo”
BULLSHIT!
Nobody said so.
But “journalists” nowadays are full of shit and all reporting “currently there’s no proof that some electric car started the fire” (always with #electriccars) - what everyone reads as “yeah, sure the electric car was it!”
meanwhile electric cars are actually LESS likely to start a fire and still nobody in the know has actually claimed electric cars had ANYTHING to do with it.
The article linked in the post says:
A spokesman for the Coast Guard said earlier today that the fire is believed to have started in one of the electric cars. Later in the evening, the Coast Guard said that nothing is yet known about the cause.
So yeah they aren’t sure but it’s coming from the coast guard not the journalist.
Other people actually reported that coast guard not only responded with “we don’t know anything yet”, but also with “nobody of us would have told you a cause and we don’t know who did”
I’ve not seen any proof apart from wild speculation by owner/journalists yet.
And yes, the owner too pointed at electric cars - but neither people on board nor anybody near the ship was telling about that. So I’d guess that’s just repeating headlines too.
My point was: don’t claim “maybe it was electric cars”! because people don’t understand “maybe”
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German news said there might have been a Short circuit near those cars, once the Battery catches fire you basically can’t put it out.
I said there might have been aliens, testing new beam weapons - anything is possible.
we’ll never know‽ /s
Nah, there was no green light visible when the fire broke out.
They switched to gamma rays recently.
Ah! Those sneaky bastards!
German news and anti-EV propaganda, name a more iconic duo.
What? Thats literally the opposite of anti EV propaganda. And if anything our news push that stuff.
Its easy to put out car fires but when it comes to the batteries EVs have its a different game. Entirely possible it started with one or with something else. But once an EV is on fire and the batteries go, theyll need special equipment and training to put that out. Likely they didnt have those.
because it’s impossible that the other 3000 cars filled with an explosive liquid could have ignited the fire. No, it’s definitely impossible, those fuel tanks never leak, and gas vapor never explode
Pretty sure they don’t ship cars with gasoline in em, thats extra weight that doesnt need to be there let alone the fire hazard.
The electric cars on the otherhand most likely have the batteries built into the fucking frame.
Tbh all cars have at least one battery. Or it might have been some order random accident that has nothing to do with the cargo. I think we need more info on this
While that’s true I was more pointing out the falsehood in the other commentor, and while most cars have batteries lets not pretend a batter the size of a cinder block is the same as one the size of a mattress.
well that and it’s different chemistry (lead vs lithium)
…aaaand EVs have those old lead-acid batteries too. (btw: we should finally ditch those for LiFePo or similar)
They dont ship cars with gas in them
This particular ship does. It’s essentially a giant ferry that new cars are driven on to, not loaded.
I mean statistics are clear on that one… :D
What journalist?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hembrow
If you read the actual article by a journalist they don’t say it’s a certainty. Maybe the problem is people like you who can’t tell a journalist from a random guy.
If you read the actual article by a journalist they don’t say it’s a certainty. Maybe the problem is people like you who can’t tell a journalist from a random guy.
did you even read what I wrote?
I specifically said that journalists are writing “there’s no proof that it wasn’t” and that other people are reading “it was” into it.
It’s exactly that. People are unable to read/understand.
Your message is that journalists are full of shit, I’m calling you out because you couldn’t identify a journalist if they were writing an article in your face.
Stay mad.
Just tow it beyond the environment.
Yeah. Just pipe it to /dev/null
>>>>>>
Into another environment?
No. Out of the environment!
So it’s no longer in an environment.
Well, what’s out there?
Nothing.
There’s nothing out there.
Just sea and birds and fish.
And?
a couple thousands cars, sixteenhundred tons of fat oil and two-hundred tons of marine diesel.
And?
Its so hot that towing is currently not possible
It’s a reference to this, not a literal suggestion
But where will we find a wardrobe big enough to fit the ship through?
Whether you like it or not, our modern society can’t function without cars entirely, we still need delivery vehicles etc. Focusing on the fact this vessel dares to carry cars, rather than the fact the fire was able to spread between presumably multiple decks, and cause the entire cargo to burn.
Sprinkler systems on vessels is very much a thing.
Nobody here wants everything with rubber wheels banned. We just want cars to be a form of personal transport to be the lowest prioritized compared to other forms like buses, trains, etc.
Hey it looks like your comment got quadruple posted. Do you happen to use liftoff for lemmy? I do and multiposting happens to me occasionally.
Wefwef/liftoff actually! Kept getting errors and refreshing didn’t show anything. Thanks for the heads up
imagine a nationalized train system where you essentially own and park your own traincar. shit could be so efficient you could replace power lines and roads with one
That just sounds like cars with extra steps.
I mean like minus the massive inneficiency of small scale combustion engines, plus it takes away all but production pollution (rubber from the tiresz exhaust, literally anything in a car that spills out)
If we only had cars where they are needed, for emergency and delivery vehicles etc, then the demand for these sorts of things would reduce massively and the likelihood of something like this happening would plummet.
Yeah but then rich people will have to ride public transit together with the poors. Obviously we can’t have that
Good luck fighting a burning EV with sprinklers!
The aim of a sprinkler system is to contain a fire, not necessarily to extinguish it. A sprinkler system can, will, and has kept a burning EV from spreading to other vehicles.
Now, gasoline on the other hand, that floats on water, which is very annoying to put out.
good luck doing it with a burning gas powered car!
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They transport cars with no gas in them. When I was going to school I used to work part time for a service center that prepped cars for the dealer after overseas transport. There were a lot of things that had to be done. The cars didn’t even have oil in the engine.
They transport EV’s with a 40% charge which is the industry standard storage charge for Li-Ion batteries. At storage charge a Li-Ion battery is greatly less likely to spontaneously combust due to a manufacturing defect. It can still happen, but a lot less of a chance. More likely an internal short will drain the battery to zero charge before catching fire.
In any case they don’t know the cause for sure. They’re stating an EV as a possible cause, but it could be anything at this point. They can’t know the cause for sure without an investigation and that won’t happen as long as it’s burning. If the ship sinks there may be no investigation at all.
that’s the fun thing - unless you remove every last drop, emptying the gas tank makes it MORE dangerous, not less.
liquid gas in enclosed containers is actually pretty harmless. But leaking fluids mixtures of gas and air are explosive.
If they’re brand new cars they shouldn’t have gas in them yet. All of the final touches are done after they unload them at port.
how do you think those cars were loaded into the ship? by crane?
Duh?
You think they drove them all onto the ship?
Fuel and other hydrocarbons float on water, which makes them very difficult to extinguish.
and a burning car is a whole lot of burning material
it’s not a tiny piece of wood - in many cases you’ll detect it first, when there’s actually a whole lot and flames/smoke escaping from the car.
can’t function without cars entirely, we still need delivery vehicles etc.
yeah, okay. But we need far fewer than we have. So producing them and shipping them around the globe needs to be reduced dramatically. So that point still kinda stands?
And yes “this should have been made safer” is another point - but that doesnt invalidate the other.
So producing them and shipping them around the globe needs to be reduced dramatically. So that point still kinda stands?
The supply side is the wrong place to tackle this problem though. If you limit the amount of new cars that may be produced, people will simply drive their older ones for longer.
no infastructure needs to change. less roads more rails that simple. walkable cities and transit in between cities
Exactly
Driving an older car, and by extension not buying a newer car, decreases demand and would improve the amount of these cargo ships on the sea, thus lowering the opportunity for this to happen. I’m not sure if your comment was for or against people driving their older cars, but I think driving an older car is better than upgrading and buying a newer car
An older more polluting car migth not be the better option. But if the new car is one of those giant murde boxes then it’s not going to be an upgrade either.
totally correct
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Gotta love the industrial-technological system. It really improves life for everyone!
This could happen with every other ship as well, with every cargo.
Fewer shipments would be needed for more efficiently sized vehicles, so it would happen less.
Cargo containers are a standardized sizes and they fit a certain number of cars, the only way to fit more is to make cars small enough that they’re simply unsafe in an accident.
Smaller cars are great. “Unsafe in an accident” is dependant on speed, and if you’re just driving in a city you don’t need a vehicle designed for highway speeds.
Also other vehicles do exist.
If you only drive in a city then you don’t need to own a car at all, so that point is moot.
Small cars from the 80s/90s are a death trap even at slow speeds and making them safe requires them to be bigger, even if it’s only for slow speed accidents. Heck, speed limits in cities can go as high as 55mph/90kph, that’s pretty freaking fast and not a speed I would love getting hit at in a Kei car (my brother has one, you’re safe in it because of how small it is and how thin everything is around you).
Small cars from the 80s/90s are a death trap even at slow speeds and making them safe requires them to be bigger
it’s probably not the 90s you’re thinking about.
90s cars had airbags, large crumple zones and seat belts. Those were pretty safe already. Maybe you are thinking 60s and 70s?
Yes, 90s cars were fucked if hit by 3t of steel at 180km/h, yes. But so are current cars.
And less heavy cars that run into you, made less safety needed. So if we were to build only light (say sub 1t and driving 80km/h max) cars to modern standards, we would all be way better off. But people are assholes, so that won’t happen.
I absolutely need a car in my city. Poor public transit isn’t a purely rural phenomenon—thus this community.
Seriously. This thread is filled with lettuce munching hippies from what I can tell.
I mean, I probably count as that. I’m just saying that the problem is even worse than they think: not every city is walkable.
You’re on fuckcars, the argument isn’t that these cars specifically are an issue. It’s that all cars are.
a high concentration of large lithium batteries might make the fire a bit worse.
so if this was 100% petrol cars, i think the risk and severity of fire is lower.
They corrected the number of cars up to 4000 (:
And electric cars to about 500
…alright, maybe this is a stupid question, but how is it we can’t get 8 ships out there meant to suck up sea water and blast it onto the fire until its out? How is it that waiting for it to burn out our best option here?
Water stops fire because it spills over the burning mess and starves it of oxygen.
A burning lithium cell releases both oxidizer and fuel, which, because of the temperature, can now burn more of the lithium cell and release more oxidizer and fuel.
Which essentially burns down to LiPos can burn underwater and water won’t quench them.
Also, blasting a ship with water means that it will, eventually, sink. Spilling its own heavy fuel, and all the cargo onboard into the sea.
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This is probably the most braindead take I’ve seen in a while. Fuck cars but this dude is presenting it as if Satan himself was in the cargo hold.
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Mmmhm you’re a puppet if you don’t support oil and auto interests.
Calm your fucking tits david, you can say this shit about any export product to ever exist
Can you? Bet a ship full of bikes wouldn’t burn like that and their ecological impact while in use wouldn’t be the same.
So bikes are transported on little dingies and not giant oiltankers than?
Well oil is transported on oil tankers, not cars. And I bet a ship this size could fit a lot more than 3000 bikes.
