JR SHIPPING

A Dutch container ship of the company JR Shipping ran into problems on Wednesday morning in the Baltic Sea due to a fire in the engine room. The ship, the MV Escape (1436 teu), was en route from the city of Klaipėda in Lithuania to Riga, the capital of Latvia. The fifteen crew members had to abandon ship because of the fire.

The fire broke out in the ship’s engine room early Wednesday morning, a spokesman for the company said. The crew tried to extinguish the fire, but when that failed, the captain and the crew decided to transfer to another ship that had been alerted by the Latvian coastguard and was lying nearby. That ship is now on its way to the Latvian capital Riga.

JR Shipping’s ship drifted adrift for some time. It is now being towed to the port of Riga. There it will be checked whether the fire is still raging and what the damage is.