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A fire broke out on board a cruise ship currently being built at Finland's Meyer Turku Shipyard, the shipbuilder said on Monday.Welding operations reportedly sparked a fire to stored equipment on deck 15 inside the Costa Smeralda at approximately 4:45 p.m. local time, forcing workers to evacuate the vessel, the shipbuilder said.The shipyard's firefighters were the first on scene and started firefighting measures, followed shortly after by local responders. The blaze was extinguished quickly and work on board was able to resume by 6:15 p.m. local time.Meyer Turku said approximately 10 people have inhaled small amounts of smoke and two people have been examined for minor injuries.

Ship hull biofouling has significant impacts on fleet readiness, ship performance, cost, and the environment.  Biofouling results in increased hydrodynamic drag which results in greater fuel use and greater emissions per distance traveled than a hydraulically-smooth hull.  A study by Schultz, et al. found the typical fouling rating (FR) of a US Navy DDG-51 class vessel, FR-30, increases fuel consumption by 10.3% over a hydraulically-smooth DDG-51.  Results showed that reducing this fouling rating to FR-20 would lead to savings of $340K per ship and more than double that when the hull was kept at a fouling rating of FR-10, saving the US Navy nearly $800K per hull annually.

Turkey’s leading tug builder Sanmar Shipyards was selected by Caterpillar Marine to build the first tug to incorporate its hydraulic hybrid propulsion system. Construction is currently under way with delivery scheduled for October 2019. Furthermore the two companies, from different continents, are joining together to present their collaborative efforts at the Tugnology 19 Conference and Exhibition, scheduled to be held in Liverpool, England, May 14-15, 2019.Tugs represent some of the more power dense and cost competitive vessels, making them uniquely challenging platforms in which to adopt hybridisation technologies.

As maritime digests a number of historical changes, Norway’s Fjellstrand shipyard wants to put aside the rule book and look at the whole process in a new way, reducing engineering costs up to 70% and production costs up to 20%.The process of designing and building a ship, even in today’s highly standardized mass manufacturing environment, remains largely a one-off, one-of-a-kind design and build. Ships are most often built to a shipowner’s or operator’s specific requirements, which are often based on fixed parameters such as speed, fuel consumption, route and cargo or passenger capacity.

MSC Cruises and Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri  signed the final contracts for the construction of four luxury cruise ships.The announcement follows the initial signing of a memorandum of agreement between the two parties in October 2018. The contracts, subject to shipowner financing, have a total value exceeding $2.2 billion.As per the terms of the agreement, the first of the four ships will be delivered by Spring 2023. The remaining three will come into service one per year over the following three years through 2026.Pierfrancesco Vago, Executive Chairman of MSC’s Cruises Division, said: “With this now firm order, MSC is entering a new segment that bears significant potential globally.