The fire that erupted aboard a Grimaldi Group ro-ro vessel off New Jersey on Wednesday night is still burning and may continue to do so for days, an incident management official said on Friday.
The fire started at about 9:30pm local time Wednesday (0130 GMT Thursday) on the 3,950-lane-metre Grande Costa d’Avorio (built in 2011), controlled by subsidiary Grimaldi Deep Sea, while it was at berth at the Port of Newark.
The fire, which began on the 10th deck of the Italian-flagged vessel, has caused the deaths of two firefighters and injury to six other firefighters within the Newark Fire Department.
“The fire is going to burn for a couple more days probably. It’s impossible to give you really a definitive kind of timeline,” Tom Wiker, president of incident management company Gallagher Marine Systems, said on Friday during a press conference.
“Teams are fighting a variety of fires among the several decks in the superstructure. To combat that, there is a team of 20-plus firefighters and additional salvage support who have been fighting this fire around the clock since it began.”
He said nine more firefighters will join the firefight on Friday that has enlisted the services of the fire departments of Newark, New York City and Jersey City, including a New York Fire Department-owned fire boat.
Friday’s goal for the incident’s unified command, which includes the US Coast Guard, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and salvage company Donjon-Smit, is to get the fire under control.
“Our plan for today is to contain the fire, to cool the vessel so that the fire no longer spreads throughout the vessel, to keep it toward the top decks where it is currently located,” Donjon-Smit project manager Gordon Lorenson said.
“We’re also working on dewatering the vessel, getting rid of the water that is being put on the vessel via the fire pumps and taking some of the list out of the vessel so it becomes more stable.
“The vessel is being stable at this point in time, but our goal is to always get it up to an even keel, which is level.”
Lorenson said the fire is taking a while to extinguish because access to the flames is difficult and the heat is extreme.
“It’s a steel box, so it’s a very complex situation,” he said.
“You can do all the training in the world, and you’re going to find something you’ve never seen before.”
An investigation into the cause of the fire will be conducted after the fire is completely put out, said Zeita Merchant, captain of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
“All federal agencies and state and local levels in addition to the owner of the vessel will be working closely to identify the root cause of the fire and the subsequent fatalities to prevent similar incidents from ever happening again,” she said.
In the meantime, the authority is ensuring that the fire causes minimal disruption to the flow of commerce in and out of the Port of Newark, authority director Beth Rooney said.
“The channel in which the vessel is tied up has been closed to ship traffic,” she said.
“As a result of that, there is a modest amount of cargo activity that has been impacted, predominantly and due to automobiles, so additional car carriers that were expected to call to the port in the last 36 hours have been impacted.”
She said that several car carriers are waiting to berth as a result of the fire, but 99.9% of cargo traffic has been unaffected since it broke out.
“The good news is that the impact on the container terminals has been completely negligible,” Rooney said.
