Leading Italian shipowner Emanuele Grimaldi has called for fresh measures to prevent fires on containerships and ropax vessels.
He is urging criminal sanctions be introduced for the misdeclaration of cargo, stringent controls on the stowage of containers, and restrictions on refrigerated trailers and camper vans on ropax vessels
Speaking on the fringes of the Euromed conference in Sicily, his call for stricter regulation came as he responded to questions over the recent spate of fires aboard containerships, ropax vessels and car carriers.
The Grimaldi Group is among the shipowners to gave suffered this year, with two major fire incidents onboard its ropax fleet.
“I have very clear ideas how to stop all this,” Emanuele Grimaldi told journalists.“Dangerous cargoes need to be declared. If you don’t declare and there is dangerous cargo, then there should be a penal law for the shipment.”
In March, Grimaldi Group’s 50,000-gt ro-ro Grande America (built 2007) sank off the Bay of Biscay, with a cargo of Porsche and Audi cars.
Container incident
But the group has deemed the incident to have been “a container issue”, rather than a ropax safety one. The Grande America sank, owing to a combination of free surface effect that was caused by firefighting water and cargo shift.But the fire was linked to deck containers holding hazardous cargoes.
In the wake of the incident, the group asked the IMO to make it mandatory for containerised cargoes to be certified as being safely stowed by a classification society.
Emanuele Grimaldi told Euromed delegates that the involvement of classification societies was necessary due to a lack of awareness of how fires might start, such as when different cargoes move and come into contact with one another.
Tighter checks
He added that checks on loading and stowage of dangerous cargoes in containers needed to tighten up.
And he cited instances where fires had started after containers were poorly stacked and the contents had leaked.
But, he added, the cost to enable classification societies to check containers “was not a big issue” and applying the changes would make the business safer.
Grimaldi Group suffered again on 13 May when the 3,320-lane-metre Grande Europa (built 1998), which was loaded with 1,843 vehicles, caught fire off Spain and was evacuated.
Emanuele Grimaldi said the vessel is under repair and will soon be back in the outfit’s fleet.
But the incident has generated concerns over the shipment of electric cars.
Operators fear that increasing transportation volumes of electric and hybrid cars with lithium-ion batteries will lead to more fires.
Preliminary investigations into the Grande Europa blaze by the Grimaldi Group point to the possibility that the blaze on a car carrier off the coast of Spain is likely to have been caused by batteries in two new cars onboard.
Emanuele Grimaldi believes that there should be “serious tests” involving new and more powerful batteries used in electric vehicles.
Ropax safety
In the ropax sector, he cited two practices that would stop immediately.
One would be to ban refrigerated trailers without plugs — that is, older trailers that do not have electrical plugs use their own engines and are a potential fire hazard.
He also urged a ban on people camping onboard ropax vessels, where heating or cooking inside campervans generates another fire hazard.
Regarding the incidents involving his own vessels, Grimaldi said much depended on the results of the various investigations.
“If we learn something, we will have to apply this to avoid in the future a similar case,” he said
