A fire on a Turkish cargo ship carrying 200 trucks and tons of hazardous material was subsiding Thursday afternoon, and it was being kept away from the Croatian coast. Officials said a potential ecological disaster seemed to have been averted. The ship, the Und Adriyatic, "is absolutely under control now," Minister for Sea and Transport Bozidar Kalmeta told the Cabinet.

It is "stable, there is no more open fire on it," Kalmeta said. "All evaluations show that the situation will remain like that, so there is no danger of pollution." The ship was pushed by overnight winds to within 5 miles (8 kilometers) of Croatia's Brijuni Islands in the northern Adriatic Sea, but moved away later Thursday as the wind changed course, local emergency official Klaudio Karlovic said. The islands are home to one of Croatia's national parks and are a popular tourist destination.

Five tugboats, including two from neighboring Italy, were dousing the ship with water, officials said. Maritime salvage specialists from Dutch company Smit Salvage B.V. — hired by the ship's owners in Turkey — were to board the ship and assess how best to deal with it, said Stjepan Huzjak from the government's office for interventions at sea. He said one option was to drag the ship to a so-called safe harbor.

The incident alarmed Croatia and neighboring Slovenia and Italy, as officials worried the ship could sink or leak chemicals to pollute the waters. The company that owns the ship said in Istanbul there was no danger of it sinking. "A situation that would lead to environmental damage is out of the question," said Cuneyt Solakoglu, manager of UN Ro-Ro Company.

He said the fire started Wednesday in one of the 197 trucks aboard, and that only three of the trucks were carrying hazardous material, mostly paint and matches. Croatian authorities had said earlier that the ship carried about 9 tons of hazardous materials, including matches, and that the ship's tanks contained about 800 tons of fuel.

Vjeran Pirsic, an ecological expert, said that while there apparently is no pollution of the sea, the fire has already polluted the air. He also warned that Croatia should prepare itself better for such incidents: "Luckily, the ship did not carry oil, because if oil had spilled into the sea, there would be no tourism in Croatia this year."

The Und Adriyatik had been sailing from Istanbul to the Italian port of Trieste when it caught fire about 17 miles (27 kilometers) from Croatia's northwestern coast. All nine passengers and 22 crew members were rescued from the ship Wednesday and transferred to Italy.

(International Herald Tribune, 07/02/2008)