Friday 18 February 2022 · moved the Index · plateau
Felicity Ace ablaze
The Panamanian-flagged cargo ship Felicity Ace caught fire in the mid-Atlantic on February 16-17, 2022, while carrying approximately 4,000 luxury vehicles including Porsches, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, and Audis bound for the United States. The crew abandoned ship safely. The vessel remained adrift and burning for weeks before sinking in early March 2022 off the coast of Portugal.
Peak 155.9 on Thursday 3 March 2022. The shaded band is the incident window.
Where the attention came from
Mixed, both over the window and on the peak day. Mixed means no single signal dominated — the attention was spread across search, research, news and social. Social here is X alone — Bluesky only joins the series from July 2024 — so its level isn't directly comparable with today's series, though its share of this incident is real.
Bar = share of the extra attention over the whole window; the tick marks the share on the peak day alone, where the two differ.
How unusual it was
The #7 incident since 2020 by peak. Its peak day ranks #115 among all days — the higher days all belong to 7 bigger incidents.
How far it spread
Sector-wide — 4 of 6 vessel-type groups drew clearly more readers than usual.
Container & cargo ships rose on just one day of the window, staying flat either side — readership of a vessel-type article can jump for a day on one popular link or an unrelated story about the same vessel type.
Car carriers (ro-ro) is a small readership base — normally about 496 readers a day, so a few hundred extra makes a large multiple.
Bulk carriers is a small readership base — normally about 443 readers a day, so a few hundred extra makes a large multiple.
Gas-carrier readership was already running high through this window on the European gas crisis that followed the invasion of Ukraine — including the US–EU gas supply deal announced on 25 March 2022 — so this lift belongs to the energy story, not to this incident.
Readers here means readers of the Wikipedia article on each vessel type — the same source as the Research signal, not news coverage — so an incident can dominate the news without moving this panel. Bars start at 1× — normal readership for that vessel type, the weeks before the incident. Grey = no clear lift. "Over time" shows each group's daily readers through the window; "All 12 articles" breaks the six groups back into their members.
How it was framed the frame glossary →
Lead frame: human drama. Trade press was 2% of in-scope coverage — the story had left the trade press and gone mainstream. (Historical coverage is scored on headlines only.)
Acting, or acted upon
In 63% of coverage shipping was the thing acted upon rather than the actor.
How the coverage sounded
Coverage ran 79% negative overall; 15% strongly so.
Each article is scored on a five-step scale from strongly negative to strongly positive; the bar is the share of coverage at each step.
Sample of the headlines
- Porsche-Carrying Cargo Ship Felicity Ace Has Sunk in the Atlanticmsn.com · 2022-03-01
- 'Felicity Ace' Cargo Ship Has Sunk; Was Carrying Porsches, Lamborghiniscaranddriver.com · 2022-03-01
- Huge Damages Await Volkswagen Group as Cargo Ship Felicity Ace Heads to the Bahamasautoworldnews.com · 2022-03-01
- Volkswagen Loses Almost 4,000 Cars As the Felicity Ace Cargo Ship Sinks in Rough Seasautoevolution.com · 2022-03-01
- Firefighting efforts aboard the Felicity Ace cargo shipfirerescue1.com · 2022-03-01
- Felicity Ace: Cargo ship carrying millions of dollars worth of Porsche, Lamborghini and Bentley cars sinks9news.com.au · 2022-03-02
Gold rule = a national or international outlet, not a trade title.
- social = X only before Bluesky (2024-07-01); not comparable with today's series
- The window here was set by editorial judgement, not by the detector alone — its bounds were adjusted to match the documented course of events.
Maritime Attention Index, incident: Felicity Ace ablaze, peak 155.9 on 3 March 2022. maritimeattentionindex.com/incidents/2022-felicity-ace-ablaze/