“Oh, that could never happen…”

I took a break from wrapping up the final manuscript for Book Four — more on that to be publicized in a matter of days! — to catch up on the news. You know, the usual stuff; war, Olympics, burning car carrier, Covid —

Wait, what? Burning car carrier? That sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?

Well, if you’ve read Threat Bias (and if not, this is a tiny bit of plot spoiler, so stop, read the book, and come back, if you please), the fate of the Panama-flagged “Felicity Ace” ship is an intersection of two things I explored in my book.

If you haven’t seen the story, allow me to recap it. The roll-on, roll-ff (ro-ro) cargo ship “Felicity Ace” caught on fire on February 16. All 22 crew members were safely evacuated. Today, February 23, as I write this, the fire has almost burnt itself out—a week later, but it continues to smolder as efforts are being made to tow the ship… somewhere. Who would want it at this point? The ship, valued at perhaps $25 million, is a total loss, as is the ship’s cargo: about 4,000 vehicles tallying just under a cool half-billion dollars. Ouch.

A reasonable question to ask is this: on a ship surrounded by gazillions of gallons of water—a very effective firefighting solution—how is it that the fire was unstoppable?

The answer, it seems, is that many of the cars aboard were electric, with lithium ion battery packs. Readers of Threat Bias knows what happens when these types of batteries ignite: they tend to become “runaway fires,” impervious to water and with a nasty habit of dying down and then recombusting themselves.

Furthermore, drenching a ship with hundreds of thousands of gallons of seawater would cause stability issues.

While the source of the fire remains unknown, the fire’s duration seems to be at least partially attributable to the battery packs.

Conclusions? Well, it’s a terrible hit to the atmosphere, though I’d imagine that once the ship reaches a port somewhere, it will be mostly scrapped and partially recycled. It’s a relief that no lives were lost.

Oh, yeah, and one more conclusion: I was conservative in my estimates on both runaway lithium ion battery fires and on car carrier load factors. So, whenever a critic points to Threat Bias and says, “Oh, that could never happen,” point them here!

Photo credit: Autoweek