Fire Destroys Three Yachts at Maxi Dolphin's Erbusco Yard

What happened at the Maxi Dolphin fire?

A fire broke out inside Maxi Dolphin's production shed in Erbusco, near Brescia, at roughly 22:00 on Monday 24 August 2026, and burned through the night before around fifty firefighters brought it under control. No one was hurt, and the fire was kept to a single building, but that building and everything inside it was destroyed.

The alarm went up late on 24 August at the yard's site on Via Gandhi in the Villa Pedergnano industrial zone, close to the A4 motorway. Flames reported at over ten metres high, fed by the resin and composite materials stored and worked on site, lit the night sky and were visible for kilometres, with a column of black smoke spreading over the surrounding countryside. The yard's own shift had finished at 18:00 and the site was closed and empty when the fire took hold, which is why nobody was hurt.

Around fifty firefighters with thirteen vehicles were pulled in from across Brescia province and from neighbouring Mantova and Bergamo, alongside carabinieri from Chiari and Erbusco's local police. The operation ran long into the night: the roof of the production shed collapsed, but the response held the fire to that one building and stopped it reaching an adjacent warehouse. By the following day the flames were out and crews had moved to making the site safe.

Which yachts were destroyed in the fire?

Three boats were lost: an MD80 sailing yacht that was essentially finished and due to leave for Marina di Ravenna, an MD75 sailing yacht, and an MD51 Power motoryacht.

The MD80 was the most advanced of the three, close enough to complete that it was preparing to head to Marina di Ravenna when the fire took it. It is Maxi Dolphin's current sailing flagship in build: a 27.07-metre performance cruiser designed by Botin & Partners, drawing 5 metres with the lifting keel down and 3.1 metres up, built for 6 to 7 guests and 3 to 6 crew, with a single Yanmar 110hp auxiliary engine and an interior by Federica Ravera and Patrick Pigoni. The MD75 lost alongside it is a sister hull to Karma, an earlier MD75 now listed for resale through Berthon International, in the same semi-custom performance-cruiser range Maxi Dolphin has built since its collaboration with designer Luca Brenta began in 1999.

The MD51 Power was the smaller loss by size but the one with the longest history: it is the model that took Maxi Dolphin into motoryachts in 2007, seven years after Vittorio Moretti's yard had built nothing but sailing boats. The fire also destroyed Ma-Ga, a specialist joinery workshop making interior furniture on the same site, which supplied cabinetry for both the sail and power ranges. That is a second business now off Maxi Dolphin's build schedule, on top of the shed itself.

What caused the fire, and was there an environmental risk?

Investigators have not yet determined what started the fire, and Italy's regional environmental protection agency, Arpa, found no critical air-quality readings once its technicians reached the site.

A composite boatyard is, by the nature of the work, a fire risk that never fully goes away: fibreglass lay-up, resin curing and paint booths all involve flammable chemicals in close quarters, and Maxi Dolphin has built exclusively in fibreglass since 1987. Whether Monday's fire started as an electrical fault, in the resin or paint areas, or some other way has not been established, and neither Maxi Dolphin nor the Brescia fire brigade has named a cause as of this report.

Arpa technicians attended alongside the firefighters specifically because the yard works with carbon fibre and fibreglass, materials that raise real questions about what burns off into the air around a residential and light-industrial zone. By the time Arpa's team arrived, the fire was already largely under control, and the agency said it did not need to deploy its high-volume air-quality sampler, reporting no critical pollutant levels detected. That is a genuinely reassuring reading, but it covers only the moment Arpa measured it, not the hours the fire burned unmonitored before crews arrived.

What does this mean for owners with a boat in build at Maxi Dolphin?

Maxi Dolphin's chief executive has promised to keep building, at a new site, for both the sail and power ranges, but nothing has been said publicly yet about insurance cover, compensation or revised delivery dates for the owners whose hulls were destroyed.

For the owner who was waiting on the MD80, the timing is about as bad as it gets: a yacht days from leaving the yard, gone the night before it was due to travel. That risk sits with every buyer of a custom or semi-custom yacht, at any yard, for the length of a build that can run one to three years: the boat is an asset under someone else's roof, subject to that yard's own fire suppression, electrical maintenance and insurance arrangements, none of which the buyer controls directly. A pre-purchase or pre-build check of a yard's insurance cover and its own fire and safety record is a genuinely useful question for a buyer to ask before signing, and this is the kind of event that makes clear why.

Maxi Dolphin's chief executive, Luca Botter, went on the record the same week rather than leaving the question open: "The fire has stopped us and it is an immense pain, but we will restart straight away at another site, for both the motorboats and the sailing boats. We will not stop." That is a public commitment to keep building, which matters to anyone with an order on the books. It is not, yet, an answer to what happens to the specific MD80 and MD75 hulls that were lost, whether either owner carried insurance that covers a yard-side total loss, or how long a move to a new production site pushes back delivery for every other hull currently in build.

Who is Maxi Dolphin, and why does the fire matter beyond Erbusco

Maxi Dolphin is a family-owned Italian yard founded in 1987 by entrepreneur Vittorio Moretti, known first for racing sailing yachts and, since 2007, for motoryachts too, and the fire is a real loss to a small but established name in custom composite boatbuilding.

The yard's history runs from one-design racing boats in the 1990s through its 1999 partnership with designer Luca Brenta, which produced the 36-metre MD118 Viriella, a German Frers design launched in 2001, one of the yard's best-known large sailing yachts. Vittorio Moretti's family has owned the company throughout; Luca Botter has run it as chief executive since 2016, when MD Technologies Srl took on the Maxi Dolphin brand. The current range spans the MD38 Arrayan up to the MD118 on the sailing side, and the MD48 to MD70 on the power side, with the MD80 destroyed in this fire the newest and largest sailing model in build.

Erbusco sits in Brescia's Franciacorta district, better known for wine than boatbuilding, which makes Maxi Dolphin something of an outlier: a serious custom composite yard operating well inland, trucking finished hulls to the coast rather than launching them at the door. That geography is part of why the fire is contained to Maxi Dolphin's own business rather than a wider marina or waterfront, but it also means a rebuild has to start from nothing at a new site, with no existing shed to fall back into. For a yard this size, with a small handful of large custom builds in progress at any time, losing one shed and three hulls in a single night is a serious setback, and how quickly Botter can make good on restarting elsewhere will decide whether Maxi Dolphin keeps the clients it has now or loses them to yards that can promise a firmer date.