THE obvious reason for the increasing number of container that go overboard, says a hand-wringing article in the New Yorker, is numerical.
'Some six thousand containerships are out on the ocean at any given moment. The largest of these can carry more than [20,000 TEU] per voyage. Collectively, they transport a quarter of a billion [TEU] around the world every year.
'Given the sheer scale of those numbers, plus the factors that have always bedevilled maritime travel - squalls, swells, hurricanes, rogue waves, shallow reefs, equipment failure, human error, the corrosive effects of salt water and wind - some of those containers are bound to end up in the water,' the article said.
'During the past half century or so, the shipping container has radically reshaped the global economy and the everyday lives of almost everyone on the planet. The tale of that transformation was recounted a decade and a half ago by Marc Levinson in 'The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.'
'The vessels that carry those stacks start at a size that you and I might regard as large - say, 400 feet from bow to stern, or roughly the length of a baseball field from home plate to the centre field wall - but that the shipping industry describes as a small feeder.
'Then things scale up, from a regular feeder, a feedermax, and a panamax 965 feet, the maximum that could fit through the Panama Canal before recent expansion projects there) all the way to the aptly named Ultra Large Container Vessel, which is about 13,000 feet long. Tipped on one end and plunked down on Forty-second Street, a ULCV would tower over the Chrysler Building.
'The crews of these ultra-large ships are, by comparison, ultra-tiny; a ULCV can travel from Hong Kong to California carrying [23,000 TEU] and just 25 people. As a result, it is not unheard-of for a few of those containers to go overboard without anyone even noticing until the vessel arrives in port. More often, though, many containers shift and fall together in a dramatic occurrence known as a stack collapse. If 50 or more containers go overboard in a single such incident, the shipping industry deems the episode a 'catastrophic event'.
'One reason incidents like these are on the rise is that storms and high winds, long the chief culprit in container loss, are growing both more frequent and more intense as the climate becomes more volatile,' said the New Yorker article.
'Another is the trend toward ever-larger containerships, which has compromised the steering of the vessel and the security of the containers (in both cases because the high stacks on deck catch the wind), while simultaneously rendering those ships vulnerable to parametric rolling, a rare phenomenon that places extreme stress on the containers and the systems meant to secure them.
'More recently, the steep rise in demand for goods during the Covid era has meant that ships that once travelled at partial capacity now set off fully loaded and crews are pressured to adhere to strict timetables, even if doing so requires ignoring problems on board or sailing through storms instead of around them.
'To make matters worse, shipping containers themselves are in short supply, both because of the increase in demand and because many of them are stuck in the wrong ports owing to earlier shutdowns, and so older containers with aging locking mechanisms have remained in or been returned to circulation.
'In addition to all this, the risk of human error has gone up during the pandemic as working conditions on container ships, already suboptimal, have further declined - particularly as crew members, too, have sometimes been stuck for weeks or months on a ship in port or at anchor, stranded indefinitely in a worldwide maritime traffic jam.
' For an object that is fundamentally a box, designed to keep things inside it, the shipping container is a remarkable lesson in the uncontainable nature of modern life - the way our choices, like our goods, ramify around the world.
'The only thing those flat-screen TVs and Garfield telephones and all the other wildly variable contents of lost shipping containers have in common is that, collectively, they make plain the scale of our excess consumption,' the article concludes.
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'Some six thousand containerships are out on the ocean at any given moment. The largest of these can carry more than [20,000 TEU] per voyage. Collectively, they transport a quarter of a billion [TEU] around the world every year.
'Given the sheer scale of those numbers, plus the factors that have always bedevilled maritime travel - squalls, swells, hurricanes, rogue waves, shallow reefs, equipment failure, human error, the corrosive effects of salt water and wind - some of those containers are bound to end up in the water,' the article said.
'During the past half century or so, the shipping container has radically reshaped the global economy and the everyday lives of almost everyone on the planet. The tale of that transformation was recounted a decade and a half ago by Marc Levinson in 'The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.'
'The vessels that carry those stacks start at a size that you and I might regard as large - say, 400 feet from bow to stern, or roughly the length of a baseball field from home plate to the centre field wall - but that the shipping industry describes as a small feeder.
'Then things scale up, from a regular feeder, a feedermax, and a panamax 965 feet, the maximum that could fit through the Panama Canal before recent expansion projects there) all the way to the aptly named Ultra Large Container Vessel, which is about 13,000 feet long. Tipped on one end and plunked down on Forty-second Street, a ULCV would tower over the Chrysler Building.
'The crews of these ultra-large ships are, by comparison, ultra-tiny; a ULCV can travel from Hong Kong to California carrying [23,000 TEU] and just 25 people. As a result, it is not unheard-of for a few of those containers to go overboard without anyone even noticing until the vessel arrives in port. More often, though, many containers shift and fall together in a dramatic occurrence known as a stack collapse. If 50 or more containers go overboard in a single such incident, the shipping industry deems the episode a 'catastrophic event'.
'One reason incidents like these are on the rise is that storms and high winds, long the chief culprit in container loss, are growing both more frequent and more intense as the climate becomes more volatile,' said the New Yorker article.
'Another is the trend toward ever-larger containerships, which has compromised the steering of the vessel and the security of the containers (in both cases because the high stacks on deck catch the wind), while simultaneously rendering those ships vulnerable to parametric rolling, a rare phenomenon that places extreme stress on the containers and the systems meant to secure them.
'More recently, the steep rise in demand for goods during the Covid era has meant that ships that once travelled at partial capacity now set off fully loaded and crews are pressured to adhere to strict timetables, even if doing so requires ignoring problems on board or sailing through storms instead of around them.
'To make matters worse, shipping containers themselves are in short supply, both because of the increase in demand and because many of them are stuck in the wrong ports owing to earlier shutdowns, and so older containers with aging locking mechanisms have remained in or been returned to circulation.
'In addition to all this, the risk of human error has gone up during the pandemic as working conditions on container ships, already suboptimal, have further declined - particularly as crew members, too, have sometimes been stuck for weeks or months on a ship in port or at anchor, stranded indefinitely in a worldwide maritime traffic jam.
' For an object that is fundamentally a box, designed to keep things inside it, the shipping container is a remarkable lesson in the uncontainable nature of modern life - the way our choices, like our goods, ramify around the world.
'The only thing those flat-screen TVs and Garfield telephones and all the other wildly variable contents of lost shipping containers have in common is that, collectively, they make plain the scale of our excess consumption,' the article concludes.
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