Smoke was still rising from a decommissioned aircraft carrier in eastern China on Saturday after a fire broke out on the vessel during renovations the previous afternoon, according to social media posts.
Fire authorities in Nantong, Jiangsu province, said on Friday night that the blaze broke out at around 4pm on a “dilapidated aircraft carrier” docked along the Yangtze River in an industrial zone south of the city.
The incident happened during “dismantling and renovation” of the ship, it said.
“No casualties have been reported and the cause of the accident is under investigation,” the authority said, adding that local firefighting, emergency and public security departments were making “every effort” to deal with the situation.
It did not say whether the fire had been extinguished or how much damage had been caused.
Flames on the deck were still raging on Friday night and the carrier’s superstructure had partially collapsed on Saturday morning, according to images posted online.
The vessel is believed to be the Minsk, an aircraft carrier that was part of the Soviet and then the Russian navy fleet from 1978 to 1994.
Moscow sold it to a South Korean company in 1995, which three years later traded it to a Chinese private investment enterprise amid the Asian financial crisis.
It was docked in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and became the centrepiece of a theme park called Minsk World from 2000 until the attraction closed and the vessel was moved to Nantong eight years ago.
Ownership of the Minsk has changed hands several times in China, first to the state-owned financial giant Citic in 2006, then to another private firm in Shenzhen in 2010 and finally to Dalian-based developer Yongjia Group in 2013.
Yongjia had planned to launch a theme park based on the 273 metre-long (895 feet) carrier in Nantong in 2017, with a total estimated investment of about 10 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion).
But the investors said the approval procedures took much longer than expected, and the plan did not come to fruition.
Meanwhile, Yongjia was blacklisted by a Chinese court in 2020 for its poor credit record.
At the start of this year, the Nantong industrial zone said it would start renovations on the vessel in March with the goal of opening a national defence centre based on the carrier by October 1.
The Minsk is just one of a number of decommissioned aircraft carriers China has bought from other countries.
In 1998, the same year that the Minsk was sold to China, a Hong Kong-based businessman acting as the People’s Liberation Army Navy proxy bought the third-generation Soviet aircraft carrier Varyag from Ukraine.
That vessel was later adapted to become the Liaoning, China’s first aircraft carrier.
In 2000, China bought the Kiev, a vessel in the same class as the Minsk and now anchored in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin as a theme park.
Although much of its equipment had been removed when it was sold to China, the Minsk was still seen as having some military significance. After it arrived in Shenzhen, Chinese military personnel visited the carrier’s interior several times to examine the ship in detail.
The Minsk also caught fire in 1999 when it was being refitted in Guangzhou, resulting in some minor damage, according to official media reports at that year.
Two technical services workers accused of causing that fire were detained for seven days.
