The picture above, taken from a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter, shows all that remained of La Dolce Vita, a 100-foot Hargrave, after it caught fire and burned near the Marquesas Keys, about 17 miles west of Key West, Florida. All six people on the yacht at the time abandoned ship on the yacht’s tender and were escorted to shore by a Coast Guard response boat. They were not injured.
The fiberglass boat burned to the waterline and then sank. The Coast Guard is overseeing a cleanup of the diesel spill; the yacht was holding as much as 4,500 gallons of diesel fuel at the time. The owner is taking responsibility to contain and remove the spill. A commercial salvage crew deployed a containment boom to manage the spill.
The crew said the fire started on yacht’s starboard generator, and the captain called the Key West Coast Guard to report it. But the cause is under investigation. “Right now, the Coast Guard’s main concern is the environmental threat,” said Chief Petty Officer Thomas Goggans, an incident management supervisor. “The location of the fuel spill is within a National Marine Sanctuary and a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Refuge.”
La Dolce Vita is a Hargrave raised pilothouse, built in 2009. It charters for $45,000 a week. Read more:
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/florida-keys/article250028444.html
