Livorno – Eight months after the fire that led to the sinking of the “Grande America”, flames break out again on a Ro-Ro cargo ship from the same Italian shipowner. This time, the fire has been extinguished.
Livorno – The “Eurocargo Trieste”, a cargo ship of the Grimaldi company, had just left Livorno for Savona when the fire broke out in the engine room, around 2.30am on the night between Wednesday 20 and Thursday 21 November, four miles from the port of Livorno. Of the twenty-five crew members, no one was injured.
The cargo had left Livorno at 1.30 am for the Ligurian landing at Savona, when a fire broke out about four miles from the port preventing the ship from continuing its navigation and causing a power outage. The “Eurocargo” has given the alarm to the harbour master’s office and the crew was immediately reached by the emergency vehicles and pulled by four tugs.
“There were 274 semi-trailers on board, some with goods classified as dangerous, such as batteries with corrosive substances for example,” said Rear Admiral Giuseppe Tarzia, head of the Livorno shipping department. “We will verify the circumstances. The causes? The principle of fire has been determined on the starboard main engine and our inspectors are checking the causes. They entered the engine room, otherwise the ship could not enter the port.”
It is the second fire on a Grimaldi ship in a few months, after the one that led last march to the sinking of the “Grande America”, off the coast of the Bay of Biscay. The “Grande America” was a was a con-ro ship, hybrid between container and ferry, built by Fincantieri in 1997 for the Grimaldi Group. Traveling from Hamburg to Casablanca, it was transporting 2,210 vehicles and 365 70% containers on the upper deck
Telegraph
