Fire and explosion on board of the container ship MSC Flaminia, caused full evacuation of the vessel. The ship was carrying over 6500 TEU from the US port Charleston to Antwerpen Belgium, when suffered fire in one of the cargo holds in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. The reason of the fire was most probably due to wrong manifest in the container documents. The ship exploded and after that was caught on fire, which injured 4 crew members. The distress signal was sent from the navigation officer at 1007 on 14th July 2012 and the Falmouth Coastguard asked the crew to abandon the container ship MSC Flaminia. After the accident one of the crew members is missing and 2 are seriously injured. The scene of the incident was in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, so the closest vessels were about 6 hours away from MSC Flaminia, but when getting the distress signal changed courses to the ship in fire. On the place arrived five merchant ships and a few rescue boats, which supported the rescue operations, but one of the people on board is still missing.
The container ship MSC Flaminia (IMO: 9225615) is one of the large MSC vessels, which has length of 299.00 m, beam of 40.00 m and summer draft of 13.60 m. The ship has deadweight of 85,823 DWT and gross tonnage of 75,590 GRT. The ship has capacity of 6750 TEU and was almost full. The vessel is operating on long distances managed and owned by the German company Nsb Niederelbe. The ship is quite modern, built in 2001 in the South Korean shipyard Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering. The container ship MSC Flaminia was operating on route between Charleston, US and Antwerpen, Belgium and the ETA was 17th July 2012. The crew on board was from the German, Polish and Filipino nationals, but the information about injured and missing crew members was not announced.