Tuesday 16 July 2024 · below the Index · plateau
Cargo ship fire off Goa coast
A fire broke out on a cargo ship en route to Colombo off the coast of Goa, India in mid-July 2024. Blasts triggered the fire and firefighting efforts were underway. The incident generated significant social media attention alongside routine maritime industry news and reports of other shipping disruptions during the same period.
Peak 71.5 on Wednesday 17 July 2024. The shaded band is the incident window.
Where the attention came from
Social-led, both over the window and on the peak day.
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
This was above 72% of all days since 2020, and the highest since Monday 24 June 2024.
How far it spread
No vessel type moved — 0 of 6 vessel-type groups drew clearly more readers than usual.
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 9% 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 68% of coverage shipping was the thing acted upon rather than the actor; 25% of it was strongly negative in tone.
What the coverage said
- Blasts trigger fire in cargo ship off Goa coast | India Newsindiatimes.com · 2024-07-19
Gold rule = a national or international outlet, not a trade title. fewer than three independent outlets.
- tier C: only a Wikipedia article, GDELT sub-vocabulary term, or social per-term query fired — not yet confirmed as a real maritime incident (Phase C naming/is_maritime_incident does that).
- coverage scored on title only (no excerpt) — measured ~8pp frame precision cost vs title+excerpt (docs/HANDOVER-incidents.md §2.3)
- coverage filtered to articles matching this incident specifically (224/743 kept) — see coverage.filter.terms
Maritime Attention Index, incident: Cargo ship fire off Goa coast, peak 71.5 on 17 July 2024. maritimeattentionindex.com/incidents/2024-cargo-ship-fire-off-goa-coast/