A fire is blazing on a ship off the Dutch coast with almost 3000 vehicles, killing one person and injuring several others, the coast guard says.

The fire began on Tuesday night on the 199-metre Panama-registered Fremantle Highway en route from Germany to Egypt, forcing several crew members to jump overboard.

The Dutch coast guard said rescue ships sprayed water onto the burning boat to cool it down, but too much water risked its sinking.

A salvage vessel was hooked on to stop it from drifting.

“The fire is most definitely still not controlled,” said Edwin Versteeg, a spokesman for the Dutch Department Of Waterways and Public Works.

“It’s a very hard fire to extinguish, possibly because of the cargo the ship was transporting.”

The coast guard said on its website the cause of the fire was unknown, but a coast guard spokesperson had earlier told Reuters it began near an electric car.

The coast guard said Fremantle, which had departed from the port of Bremerhaven, had been towed out of shipping lanes and could sink.

It was 27 kilometres north of the Dutch island of Ameland when the fire started.

All 23 crew members were evacuated.

A helicopter took some suffering from smoke inhalation to medical facilities on the mainland.

Coast guard spokesman Edwin Granneman said salvaging experts were trying to work out the next steps for the burning boat.

A spokesperson for Shoei Kisen Kaisha, the Japanese ship leasing company that manages Fremantle, was not immediately available for comment.

The incident was the latest of several fires in recent times on car carriers.

Earlier this month, two New Jersey firefighters were killed and five injured battling a blaze on a cargo ship carrying hundreds of vehicles.

In February last year, a fire destroyed thousands of luxury cars on a ship off the coast of Portugal’s Azores islands.

-Reuters