laundry room.
Authorities are investigating a fire that damaged a Liberia-flagged bulk carrier while it was tied up at a grain terminal near Portland, Oregon.
The 623-foot Breeze was docked at the Temco Grain loading dock on the east side of the Willamette River to take on 38,000 metric tons of wheat bound for delivery to South American when the fire started in the laundry room.
Fire crews learned at about 1516 on Jan. 31 that a fire had broken out on the ‘bravo’ deck of the ship’s superstructure.
According to Portland Fire & Rescue, 11 four-person land companies from its Marine Response Unit and two four-person boat companies responded to the fire. All told, some 50 firefighters assisted in the response, according to an agency spokesperson.
“There was quite a lot of heat generated by the fire and the water we were putting on the fire quickly turned to steam on the steel deck,” Portland Fire spokesman Rick Graves told Professional Mariner. “It was a very, very hot fire…much hotter than we would find in a residential blaze.”
The 11 land-based crews “were used for firefighting efforts while the two fire boats were in place for two purposes; to serve as a potential water supply if needed as well as to act as a potential rescue boat should someone accidently go overboard while performing firefighting efforts,” Graves said.
The first arriving companies discovered a fire in the laundry room within the ship’s superstructure. They took over fighting the blaze from members of the ship’s crew, who were hosing water on the fire through an open window in an effort to keep the fire from spreading.
Breeze’s 21-man crew was comprised of Tagalog-speaking Filipinos. An interpreter served as the communications link between the Portland firefighters and the ship’s crew.
It took approximately two hours to extinguish the fire, and no injuries to either crew members or firefighting personnel. No pollution or threats to the marine environment from the incident were reported.
“Coast Guard investigators and our incident management division from Marine Safety Unit – Portland were also sent to the scene after the fire was out. There were no impacts to other vessels or the facility itself,” according to a spokesman at the Coast Guard’s 13th District Office in Seattle.
After a structural inspection, Breeze got underway from Portland on February 5. AIS data shows it arrived in Guayaquil, Ecuador on Feb. 22.
The 56,686 dwt Breeze, formerly the JPO Dorado, was built in 2009 at the Jiangsu Hantong Ship Heavy Industry yard in Tongzhou, China. The ship is managed by Oltmann Schiffarhts of Stade, Germany.