STOCKHOLM (AP) – A fire was reported Monday on a passenger ferry bound for Sweden with 300 people but officials said the blaze – which they described as “limited” – was put out. No one was reported injured.
The ferry was north of Sweden’s Baltic Sea island of Gotland when the fire broke out. No one was evacuated but one person on the ferry said passengers had gathered on the upper deck.
The vessel will be towed to its destination of Nynashamn in Sweden with all its passengers, said Lisa Mjorning of the Swedish Maritime Administration, according to the Swedish news agency TT.
The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet said a tire had caught fire on the car deck as the ferry traveled from Ventspils in Latvia to Nynashamn. Seven nearby ships and three helicopter were sent to the scene as a precaution.
Earlier in the day, Stefan Elfström, a spokesperson at the ferry company Stena Line, told Swedish broadcaster SVT the company was informed about a fire “on a limited scale” with no reports of injuries.
Norwegian newspaper VG quoted passenger Giedrius Didoras as saying that passengers all had gathered on the upper deck.
“The ferry has stopped,” he said. “We can’t see any of the flames, but we can see smoke coming from both sides of the ferry.”
The Goteborg, Sweden-based ferry company says it is one of the word’s largest ferry companies with 38 vessels that take more than 25,000 trips a year. It has 4,300 employees across Europe.
