India’s coast guard is fighting a massive blaze aboard a container ship that’s threatening to sink about 15 nautical miles off the coast of Kerala as the search continues for four missing crew members.
Images showed flames and towering plumes of diesel smoke rising from the Singaporean-flagged MV Wan Hai 503 that was tilting “10 to 15 degrees” in the water, according to Indian Coast Guard Commandant Amit Uniyal.
Explosions were still being heard on Tuesday, more than 24 hours after the Indian Coast Guard responded to a distress call. Around 9:30am local time Monday, the ship’s crew reported a fire caused by an explosion, Uniyal said, though it’s not clear what caused the blast.
Eighteen sailors were rescued from the stricken ship with “some injuries,” according to The Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore. Four crew members remain missing.
The 269-meter (890-foot) vessel left Colombo, Sri Lanka on June 7 and was set to arrive in Mumbai, India on Monday.
Five Indian Coast Guard vessels were fighting the fire Tuesday, reporting that “explosions persist from mid‑ships to the container bay ahead of the accommodation block,” according to an official social media account.
Images posted by the Indian Coast Guard show flames, black smoke and charred containers. An environmental observation vessel is monitoring their efforts, but the scale of the impact is not yet known.
The incident is the second serious shipping incident off Kerala in under a month, after the Liberian-flagged MSC ELSA 3 sank on May 25.
The vessel went down with over 600 containers including 13 containing “hazardous cargo,” according to the government of Kerela which initiated an environmental emergency and instructed fisherman against working in the area.
India’s Director General of Shipping said none of the 61 containers that washed ashore from the MSC Elsa 3 contained hazardous cargo and 51 had been removed from the shoreline as of June 9.
An underwater operation has been launched to cap the sunken ship’s oil tanks and eventually salvage its fuel, the office wrote in a statement.