Simon Hodgkinson, head of loss prevention at West P&I, believes dedicated courses are a must to safeguard mariners’ lives.
Transporting potentially explosive lithium-ion batteries on vessels is a dangerous business, as incidents in recent years have shown. An investigation by the United States Coast Guard into a freight container that caught fire on a US highway in 2021 attributed the blaze to a batch of lithium-ion batteries. The cargo ignited while enroute to the Port of Virginia, where it was to be shipped to China aboard a container vessel.
The dangers of carrying lithium-ion batteries on ships has been highlighted in an Allianz Global Corporate & Speciality report, which ranks fire and explosion as the number one cause of marine insurance losses by value from 2017 to 2021. The research, issued in November 2022, also reveals the growing threat of fires caused…