Victorians won’t feel any health impacts of recent container ship fire: Canadian Coast Guard

In a tweet Monday morning, the Canadian Coast Guard said there are currently no impacts to residents of Greater Victoria following a container fire on the MV Zim Kingston over the weekend.

The Canadian Coast Guard says the ship continues to smoulder, but is considered stable. The air quality will continue to be monitored.

At around 11 a.m. Saturday, flames could be seen coming from the MV Zim Kingston, the same vessel that lost an estimated 35 to 40 cargo containers in rough seas west of Vancouver Island on Thursday.

Crew aboard the vessel tried to fight the fire, but were unable to do so. Later that night, 16 out of the 21 total crew members were evacuated from the ship and the remaining five remained onboard to assist battling the fire.

A  two nautical mile emergency zone around the ship was set up to and a Unified Command is being stood up to manage the Incident Command Post, according to the Coast Guard.

The fire broke out on board the vessel around 11 a.m. Saturday which is anchored in Constance Bank.

The Canadian Coast Guard said a total of ten containers caught fire – two of the containers that caught fire contained 52,080 kilograms of potassium amylxanthate.

Due to the nature of chemicals in those container ships, applying water directly to the fire was not an option and instead, crew sprayed water on the hull and containers around the blaze.

This is the same ship that lost nearly 40 shipping containers off the west coast of Vancouver Island on Thursday. It’s still unclear of the contents of that container.

The incident occurred just before a major storm battered Vancouver Island with heavy winds on Sunday and today.

Officials will be providing a live update Monday afternoon.