A large cargo ship with a fire in its hold is being kept 2 miles (3.22 kilometers) offshore of an Alaska port as a precaution while efforts are undertaken to extinguish the flames, the U.S. Coast Guard said Saturday.
There were no injuries to the 19 crew members aboard the Genius Star XI, which was carrying a load of lithium-ion batteries across the Pacific Ocean, from Vietnam to San Diego, the guard’s Alaska district said in a release.
The fire started on Christmas Day in cargo hold No. 1, a spokesperson for ship owner Wisdom Marine Group said in a statement. The crew released carbon dioxide into the hold and sealed it over concerns of an explosion.
Ship’s personnel alerted the Coast Guard early Thursday morning about the fire. The Coast Guard said it diverted the 410-foot (125-meter) cargo ship to Dutch Harbor, one of the nation’s busiest fishing ports located in Unalaska, an Aleutian Islands community about 800 miles (1,287 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage.
I don’t have a definitive answer for that, even good Google results evade me. What I do know is that lithium batteries, lithium ion batteries, and lithium phosphate batteries are all slightly different things with different material properties.
You are in the right for thinking that elemental lithium batteries are generally very reactive to water, and air for that matter. But I know that lithium phosphate fires, which are the batteries that power most electric cars, have to be cooled with a lot of water to try to stop the reaction. I also recently saw a technique for conserving water when putting out an electric vehicle fire, it was to crane it into essentially a shipping container full of water.
So while I know lithium + water = bad, and lithium phosphate + water = ok for quenching, I actually can’t find any definitive results for lithium ion + water. I’m also assuming that the ship is carrying just lithium ion or lithium phosphate batteries, since they are by far the most common. (After going back and rereading the title, it seems ion alone)
