By Tracey Tully and Erin Nolan

As a fatal fire continued to burn aboard a cargo ship at Port Newark in New Jersey, emergency workers Friday scrambled to extinguish the blaze while working to prevent an environmental disaster in the most populated region of the country.

Officials said they were trying to contain the fire from outside the ship and to cool it down without filling the vessel with too much water, which could cause it to capsize into a channel that flows into Newark Bay and, farther away, the Atlantic Ocean.

There were also concerns about the heavy smoke still spewing from the Italian cargo ship, the Grande Costa d’Avorio, which is carrying 1,200 vehicles, many of them at least partially filled with gasoline and oil.

“We are fully aware of the potential environmental impacts, including air quality, and minimizing any adverse effects to the environment,” said Capt. Zeita Merchant, a regional commander for the U.S. Coast Guard, which has taken over control of the firefighting operation.

“Our efforts,” she added, “are dedicated to containing and mitigating pollution.”

Tom Wiker, president of Gallagher Marine Systems, a company hired by the vessel’s owner to oversee the recovery effort, said the company was monitoring water and air quality. Sulfur dioxide levels in the air near the ship had spiked twice to an unsafe range before dissipating, he said.

“There is no reported release of oil from the vessel as of yet,” Wiker said Friday during a news conference at the port.

The ship itself, however, is listing, awakening memories of a long-ago disaster in New York Harbor. In February 1942, the Normandie, a French ocean liner docked at a Manhattan pier, capsized after one of the most spectacular fires in the history of the New York waterfront. It took 17 months to remove the vessel from the Hudson River.

“Our goal is to always get it back to what we call an even keel, which is level,” said Gordon Lorenson, a project manager at Donjon Marine, a salvage and dredging company involved in the firefighting effort.

On Friday, nearly two days after cars aboard the cargo ship first burst into flames, firefighters were sending multiple streams of water onto the deck of the Grande Costa d’Avorio as thick, dark smoke billowed from its top decks. At the same time, water cascaded from gaping, charred holes in the ship’s exterior and into the water below like a murky waterfall.

Several hundred yards away, the air smelled faintly of burning rubber and car exhaust. Popping sounds from the ship blended with thuds and banging typically heard at the port, where shipping containers, piled high in all directions, are stacked and loaded onto trucks and ships all day long. Helicopters monitored the scene.

The fire erupted just before 9:30 p.m. Wednesday on the ship’s 10th deck and spread quickly to two upper decks. Two Newark firefighters, Augusto Acabou, 45, and Wayne Brooks Jr., 49, died trying to knock the blaze down. Funeral services for the men will be next week at the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark.

The fire has burned at temperatures so extreme that firefighters who raced onto the ship on Wednesday said their feet were scalded by water that reached its boiling point soon after being sprayed at the flames.

Officials with the Coast Guard and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns and operates the 272-acre port, said it would be impossible to predict how long the fire might burn.

The ship’s cargo — used and new cars, vans and trucks packed tightly on 12 decks — raised the specter of plumes of toxins belching into the air for days, just a few weeks after smoke from Canadian wildfires contributed to the worst air-quality readings ever recorded in New York City.

Matt Smith, the New Jersey director for Food and Water Watch, an environmental advocacy organization, said he feared a “whole alphabet soup of toxins.”

“Everything from the paint and coating that goes on the car body, the rubber from the tires, oil and lubricants in the engine,” he said. “All of that is petrochemical-based. Any time that stuff burns, you’re going to have a slew of poisonous chemicals in the air.”

Wiker said four air-monitoring devices had been installed close to the ship and a mobile monitor had been set up about a mile away.

Other than the two instances of high sulfur dioxide near the stern of the ship, he said, there have been no reports of excessively high air quality readings in the area. Water sampling was expected to start Friday afternoon, he said.

The closest residential neighborhood to Port Newark Container Terminal, as the facility is officially called, is Newark’s Ironbound area, a historically Portuguese community north of Newark Liberty International Airport.

It already has some of the nation’s worst air quality — levels that contributed to its designation as one of the state’s so-called environmental justice communities, where builders are now required to factor in pollution in order to obtain construction permits.

Both firefighters who died had worked in a firehouse in the neighborhood, and a makeshift flower memorial on benches near the station continued to grow on Friday. – New York Times