The MV Wan Hai 503 is managed by Wan Hai Lines (Singapore) Pte Ltd, according to the port authority, which said it would investigate the incident. CNN has reached out to the company for comment.
The 269-meter (890-foot) vessel left Colombo, Sri Lanka on June 7 and was set to arrive in Mumbai, India on Monday.
Uniyal told CNN Tuesday the coast guard was “doing its very best” to control the blaze, but the situation was worsening. “I can’t tell you whether the ship will sink,” Uniyal said. “More containers are catching fire.”
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.
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