Thursday 5 June 2025 · below the Index · spike
Two cargo ship fires: Alaska and Kerala
Two separate cargo ship fires drove attention during this window: a cargo ship carrying 3,000 electric vehicles caught fire and was abandoned off Alaska on June 4–5, with 22 crew members safely evacuated; separately, a Wan Hai container ship caught fire and listed off Kerala, India on June 9–10, with the Indian coast guard battling the blaze and searching for 4 missing crew members.
Peak 76.8 on Tuesday 10 June 2025. 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.
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 75% of all days since 2020, and the highest since Wednesday 28 May 2025.
How far it spread
No vessel type moved — 0 of 6 vessel-type groups drew clearly more readers than usual.
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 1% 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 76% of coverage shipping was the thing acted upon rather than the actor.
How the coverage sounded
Coverage ran 60% negative overall; 16% 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
- Indian coast guard battles massive fire on container ship listing off Keralacnn.com · 2025-06-10
- Salvage team bound for burning cargo ship off Alaska carrying Chinese carsscmp.com · 2025-06-06
- Explosions, fires on S'pore-registered cargo ship off India's Kerala coast; no S'poreans on boardstraitstimes.com · 2025-06-09
- India rescues crewmembers from burning cargo ship off Kerala – DW – 06/09/2025dw.com · 2025-06-09
- Kerala: Four crew members missing as Singapore cargo ship burns off India coastbbc.com · 2025-06-10
- Fire on cargo ship off Alaska carrying EVs left burningarabnews.com · 2025-06-07
Gold rule = a national or international outlet, not a trade title.
- Registered in a single underlying series only — one vessel-type article, news term or social query — and never moved the Index itself.
- The coverage panels count only articles matched to this incident specifically.
Maritime Attention Index, incident: Two cargo ship fires: Alaska and Kerala, peak 76.8 on 10 June 2025. maritimeattentionindex.com/incidents/2025-two-cargo-ship-fires-alaska-and-kerala/