The INEOS Britannia AC40 ‘Athena’ suffered an electrical fire that brought their Friday training session off Barcelona to a sudden close.
Quick-thinking action from the team’s on-water safety team rescued the yacht and got the badly damaged AC40 safely back to base.
The team were apporximately 25 miles offshore, north-east of Barcelona when the lithium battery caught fire.
The team chase boat was quickly alongside, fire extinguishers were deployed, and water was required to be pumped into the forward hatch to submerge the lithium battery to contain the fire, no one was injured in the incident.
Sir Ben Ainslie, Skipper and Team Principal of INEOS Britannia gave his assessment saying:
“It was clearly quite lumpy and both boats had a few touchdowns. And then Boat A very quickly had quite an extreme battery fire onboard, which there wasn’t any real sign of that coming and it was quite extreme and has caused a lot of damage to the boat.”
Ben thanked everyone involved in recovering the boat, including thelocal safety services in Barcelona, both onshore and on the water.
He continued, “Difficult day for the team because we’ve been getting a lot of really useful learnings out of the two boats, we’ve got to see quite how much damage there is to the boat, if we can rectify that or not, but yeah, a real shame.”
Asked if everyone was okay, Ben confirmed as such saying: “Everyone is okay, we had a few individuals we were potentially concerned about with smoke inhalation and things like that but we try and train for these situations and we have all of the safety equipment on the Chase Boats.”
INEOS Britannia were quick to issue a statement about the incident on their website and across social media saying:
The two British one-design AC40s (Athena & Sienna) had left the dock early for a two-boat race-training day and towed to the north-east of Barcelona City to find some good breeze.
At 10:05 CET whilst sailing off Mataro, the crew onboard Athena were required to react to a very sudden electrical fire highlighted by smoke coming out of the forward hatch.
The team chase boat was quickly alongside, fire extinguishers were deployed, but water was required to be pumped into the forward hatch to submerge the lithium battery to contain the fire, no one was injured in the incident.
After stabilising the yacht and contacting the emergency services, the team had a long tow back to the INEOS Britannia team base, with constant monitoring of the crew onboard and the lithium battery.
Crew aboard Athena: Dylan Fletcher, Ben Cornish, Luke Parkinson and Alex Hughes.
