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The world's first all-electric, zero-emissions passenger vessel conducted an emergency evacuation of hundreds of passengers on Tuesday after smoke was spotted coming from a battery compartment. No one was injured, and the operator believes that it has identified the fault. <\/p>\n
On Tuesday afternoon, the all-electric tour boat Future of the Fjords<\/em> was under way on the Aurlandsfjord, near Onstad, Norway. At about 1533 hours, the crew notified the regional emergency response center that there was smoke coming from a battery room. As a precautionary measure, the crew returned to the pier and began evacuating all 300 passengers on board. The vessel was emptied out by 1600, according to NRK, with no injuries reported.<\/p>\n The local fire department responded to the scene and treated it as a high-priority incident, given the risk of serious escalation if a lithium-ion battery bank were to catch on fire. Battery fires produce noxious smoke and high heat, and they are difficult to extinguish. A firefighting team entered the compartment and determined that the situation was under control, and they ventilated the space to clear out smoke. <\/p>\n “The potential in such incidents is dramatic,” fire team leader Tor Mikkel Tokvam told state radio outlet NRK. “When something like this happens, we take it very seriously.”<\/p>\n On Wednesday, the vessel's operator told local outlet Firda that the problem had been identified: a capacitor in an electrical panel had shorted out and overheated, producing smoke without starting a substantial fire. <\/p>\n Future of the Fjords<\/em> is a 2018-built, carbon fiber-hulled tour vessel with a capacity of 400 passengers. It was the first all-electric passenger vessel ever delivered. On a full charge, it is capable of speeds of up to 16 knots for up to 2.5 hours. It recharges with shore power in as little as 20 minutes (with a specialized docking system).<\/p>\n Top image: Future of the Fjords (Saertex \/ CC BY SA 4.0)<\/em><\/p>\n maritime-executive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The world's first all-electric, zero-emissions passenger vessel conducted an emergency evacuation of hundreds of passengers on Tuesday after smoke was spotted coming from a battery compartment. No one was injured, and the operator believes that it has identified the fault. On Tuesday afternoon, the all-electric tour boat Future of the Fjords was under way …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[225,7418,26749,11908,1150,18516,2857,549],"class_list":["post-60997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-maritime-news","tag-electric","tag-evacuates","tag-future-of-the-fjords","tag-groundbreaking","tag-passengers","tag-smoke","tag-tour","tag-vessel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/60998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}