BERLIN—Salvage crews boarded the Felicity Ace merchant ship that caught fire with a cargo of luxury Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini, Audi and Volkswagen vehicles, and began towing the vessel to safety, the operator of the ship said Friday.
The 60,000-ton Panama-flagged ship carrying about 4,000 of the world’s most-expensive car models, including electric vehicles, caught fire off Portugal’s Azores islands last week and burned intensely for days. Tugboats with water cannons sprayed the ship’s exterior to cool it down and weaken the blaze. The 22-member crew was rescued without injury after abandoning the burning ship.
Bad weather earlier in the week prevented the salvage crew from boarding the vessel, harnessing it to a tugboat and steering it to safety, a Portuguese naval officer said. On Friday, a helicopter was finally able to drop the team on board, said MOL Ship Management, which owns the company that operates the Felicity Ace.
“There is no leakage from the vessel,” MOL said in a statement. “The vessel remains stable. The smoke leaving the vessel has currently stopped and is not visible.”
It is still unclear how the fire began, but the incident underlined the fragility of global supply chains and raised questions about the safety of transporting large numbers of electric cars, whose batteries are known to be highly flammable, on cargo ships.
Some analysts estimated the value of the cargo at nearly half a billion dollars.
“We fear that large parts of the nearly 4,000 vehicles from several group brands were so damaged in the ship fire that they can no longer be delivered,” Volkswagen said in a statement, adding that the damage is covered by insurance. The Volkswagen group of brands includes Porsche, Audi, Bentley and Lamborghini.
The Felicity Ace was loaded in Emden, Germany and was headed for Davisville, R.I., when it caught fire. The ship’s master, or captain, alerted authorities about the fire and the decision to abandon the ship, MOL said last week.
After boarding the Felicity Ace on Friday, the salvage team attached the ship to a large oceangoing tugboat. The boat known as The Bear is a 2,590-ton vessel that sailed from Waalhaven, Netherlands, to the Felicity Ace off the Azores, according to a vessel tracking site.
Disabled and crewless, the Felicity Ace had drifted farther out to sea. Once attached, The Bear began hauling it to a safe area close to the Azores, escorted by three additional ships, MOL said.
SMIT Salvage, the company contracted to carry out the rescue, is the same that last year freed the Ever Given cargo ship after it became stuck in the Suez Canal.
—Patricia Kowsmann contributed to this article