LONG BEACH, Wash.-- From clothes to metals used for manufacturing, most of the world’s everyday goods and raw materials moved over long distances are packed in large metal boxes the size of tractor-trailers and stacked on ships.
Millions of containers cross the oceans every year.Not everything gets to its destination.The Associated Press looked at what happens to the thousands of shipping containers that fall off ships and are lost at sea.Sometimes hundreds of shipping containers are lost at once in storms or wrecks.
Sometimes just a few containers go overboard.The fact that ships have been getting bigger over recent years has contributed to the problem.“On the modern big ships, it’s like a high-rise building,” said Jos Koning, a senior project manager at MARIN, a Netherlands-based maritime research organization that studies shipping risks.Today’s largest cargo vessels are longer than three football fields.Cranes are used to lift containers and stack them in towering columns.
When the industry took off some 50 years ago, ships could hold only about a tenth of the freight that today’s huge ships carry.Greater size brings heightened risks.The largest ships are more difficult to maneuver and more prone to rolling in high waves.
There’s a greater chance that any single box could be damaged and crushed.Such accidents can send a container stack cascading into the sea.Accidents are often linked to cargo that has been inaccurately labeled, weighed or stored.But cargo ship operators don’t have the capacity to verify all container weights and contents, and must rely on information that shippers provide.In a pilot study, the National Cargo Bureau, a nonprofit that works with the U.S.
Coast Guard to inspect seagoing cargo, found that widespread mislabeling and improper stowage meant that nearly 70% of shipping containers arriving in the U.S.with dangerous goods failed the bureau’s safety inspection.“Despite all these problems, most of the time it arriv...