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-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 77% 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.
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; 16% of it was strongly negative in tone.
What the coverage said
- 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.
- 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).
- naming step found more than one plausible cause in the headlines (alternatives: ['Cargo ship fire off Alaska carrying electric vehicles', 'Wan Hai container ship fire off Kerala, India']) — attribution.confidence is low; label may be an honest compound
- 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 (352/817 kept) — see coverage.filter.terms
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/