A COSCO-owned vessel has been forced to make an emergency port call after reportedly catching fire in the Arabian Sea.
According to Maritime Bulletin, the 10,000 TEU COSCO Pacific was en route from Port Klang, Malaysia, to the Jawaharlal Nehru Port (JNPT), India, when a fire broke out in the cargo hold on January 4, 2020.
The ship was forced to call at the Port of Colombo, Sri Lanka, where it arrived on January 6, 2020, and the containers offloaded. As of January 7, 2020, it was still berthed at the Port of Colombo.
If reports are correct then it will be the first major fire suffered by a carrier in 2020. 2019 saw a series of serious fires, the biggest of which was the Grande America, which sunk in the Atlantic Ocean with thousands of Audi and Porsche sports cars.
In November 2019, the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) issued the first firefighting guide for container ships.
