1900 containers lost near Hawaii

[Heathenly Twins]

Originally Posted by StuM

As pointed out in the other thread on the same subject and as the headline in the link states:


Estimated 1,900 Containers Lost or Damaged


Why does everyone keep repeating the "1900 lost" when that is clearly not the case.

Looks like a lot of damaged but not lost containers on board:





I'll wait and see what the final tally is.

I'm glad I don't work as a crane operator in an intermodal port😳🤦*♂️

[mitiempo]

See post #9.

It has been confirmed that they lost 1816 containers overboard.

[mitiempo]

Update on the Opus One's losses;

https://gcaptain.com/one-apus-cargo-...eid=7c58732398

[GrowleyMonster]

Originally Posted by sagablu

Whoever was responsible for loading that ship is going to have some explaining to do.

Maybe. Maybe not. If good lashing gear and industry standard practices were used, it's just one of those things. A LOT of ships are sailing around out there, and LOT of them are container ships. So don't be too quick to blame the stevedores or even the ship's officers who were monitoring cargo operations or the Chief Mate who signed off on the loading. If they were doing everything like they were supposed to, you can't really blame them.

Sometimes, and rarely but sometimes, stfuff happens. Meteorology is still not an exact science, nor iw weather routing. Unforseeable mechanical issues can also turn a storm that is not a major threat to a ship or its cargo, into a very dangerous and damaging one.

The human element does exist. Captains are often under excrusiating pressure to meet a schedule or be under budget on fuel. It is very much a situation where you do what the shipper or the operating company expects, or they hire someone else who will. This is very common in non-US flag shipping. For those guys, following weather routing recommendations is an impossible luxury if they want to keep working. Doesn't make it right, but that's the ugly truth of the matter.

Nevertheless a lot more cargo is strewn over the highways, including very hazardous stuff, than what is lost at sea. Ships are a lot safer than trucks or even trains. But once in a while, stuff happens and it will always be so.

[Dogscout]

So whats the skinny on salvage? If someone were to find a partially sunken container do they have the right to open it up and collect any non damaged goods? A few 100 iphones or pair of nikes.

[GrowleyMonster]

Originally Posted by Dogscout

So whats the skinny on salvage? If someone were to find a partially sunken container do they have the right to open it up and collect any non damaged goods? A few 100 iphones or pair of nikes.

Sure. Pick it up out of the water with your dinghy davit or your boom. Set it on deck, Open her up and have a look inside.LOL not easily salvaged with a small yacht. But regarding ownership and acquisition, for practical purposes it's a write-off. Lost at sea. LOST at sea. Nobody's coming after you for those soggy tennies or plastic bathtub toys or "marital aids" or knockoff power tools or toaster ovens.

[Mickeyrouse]

The typical net weight of a 40 ft. Shipping container, the FEU standard size, is 40,000 lbs, plus the weight of the container itself. Most containers seal pretty well, which is why they float for a while, in some cases up to two years, depending on total weight. (We’re sailors here, we should be able to estimate flotation of a vessel of known volume and weight.)
The first container ships carried about 3,000 containers. Typical container ships can now carry up to 21,00 containers, and ships are on the drawing boards that will carry in the neighborhood of 25-27,000 containers. At present, these ships are ahead of wide-spread port facilities to accommodate them, but they’re coming.
It doesn’t make the news except in dramatic environmental cases, but ships sink all the time. There are numerous marine accident websites. It’s just a matter of time before one of these behemoths heads to Davy Jones Locker, leaving thousands of barely visible steel boxes scattered over tens of thousands of square miles of ocean. And you thought the Trash Gyre in the North Pacific was something.

[Dogscout]

Originally Posted by GrowleyMonster

Sure. Pick it up out of the water with your dinghy davit or your boom. Set it on deck, Open her up and have a look inside.LOL not easily salvaged with a small yacht. But regarding ownership and acquisition, for practical purposes it's a write-off. Lost at sea. LOST at sea. Nobody's coming after you for those soggy tennies or plastic bathtub toys or "marital aids" or knockoff power tools or toaster ovens.

Or i'll take my right angle grinder and cut a hole in the portion above water and pull out a few boxes. Theres that.

[IslandHopper]

New drone footage shows ONE Apus loss could be worse than feared

https://theloadstar.com/new-drone-fo...-first-feared/

New analysis of drone video footage of the ONE Apus container vessel, which suffered a dramatic stack collapse on 30 November in the Pacific, has revealed that as much as 4,500 teu could be lost or damaged.

The 14,000 teu vessel suffered a massive container stack collapse en route to Long Beach after encountering heavy weather near Hawaii.

The carrier confirmed that 1,816 containers had been lost overboard, including 64 dangerous goods (DG) boxes. It abandoned its route and returned to Japan, berthing at Kobe last week.

Marine claims consultant WK Webster, which has a team of surveyors at Kobe and commissioned the drone operation, told The Loadstar the footage – which, courtesy of WK Webster Loadstar readers can access via this link, shows well over 2,000 containers, the vast majority of which are 40fts, have either been lost or destroyed.

“It can be seen [from the drone footage] that there are 22 bays on deck, of which 16 have collapsed to both port and starboard, leaving only six fully or partially intact,” said Michael Hird, director of cargo casualty management at WK Webster.

“With 20 rows of containers per bay, and with stack heights of between six and eight containers, we anticipate that approximately 2,250 containers have been lost or damaged.

“It will also be noted that the vast majority appear to be 40ft units and, therefore, equivalent to approximately 4,500 teu,” he said, adding that that figure would include the 1,816 units already reported by ONE.

“That would leave just over 400 collapsed on deck – except that the photos look like there are more than that on deck. So I suspect the numbers may change a little as the vessel sorts through the debris during the discharge operations,” he said.

He added that around 18 containers were understood to have been unloaded so far, while WK Webster’s latest casualty update notes that the full discharge operation is likely to run well into January.

“The task of removing containers from the deck of the ONE Apus has begun, after permission was granted by the Japanese coastguard on Friday. ONE has reported that the removal operation is likely to take over a month, although our assessment is that this may be optimistic,” it says.

The vessel was one of 18 ships of 14,000 teu deployed on THE Alliance’s FP2 weekly North Europe-Asia-North America pendulum service. According to liner database eeSea, while ONE and Yang Ming are the vessel providers, the largest slot capacity share is given over to Hapag-Lloyd, which controls 40% of the service’s slots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSpesP7-6vo

[calmissile]

My concern would be whether any of the containers are still floating and a hazard to navigation. I have not found anything on line to indicate if anyone is even looking for them.

[Mickeyrouse]

I imagine the floaters will be found, the hard way. Nobody looks for lost containers. I think they need to be designed to quickly become sinkers in the event of loss. It would take pretty specialized vessels to safely recover them. You will note that almost no container ships have any crane or lifting equipment, relying on port operations for loading and unloading. The contents likely ruin pretty quickly. The shippers don’t bother, that’s what insurance is for. The shipping lines- same story. That leaves the insurance under-righters-usually Lloyd’s. The premiums cover the losses, which are negligible in the perspective of worldwide shipping and insurance.
Sadly that leaves yachts and fishing boats exposed. Though most containers are believed to sink fairly quickly, just a couple present real hazards to small craft. I have seen photos of yachts encountering containers in mid-Atlantic, floating barely awash, barnacle and slime encrusted. How long in the water? Could only be determined by recording the name on the container and the registration number, and searching with the operator(Mitsui, Nedlloyd, etc.) which I have not heard of being done. It’s a scary situation, with likely more all the time. And I hate to think about relying on radar to spot one, particularly if the sea is up.

[CaptTom]

One thing to emphasise here is that the largest container ship, according to Wikipedia, is rated at 23,964 TEU.

Note that TEU stands for "Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit." The vast majority of containers these days are forty feet long.

Hence, the most you're likely to see is 11982 containers on one ship. Sorry for being pedantic, but it helps if we're all working with the same units when discussing this.

[Mickeyrouse]

A quick google shows that the MV Benjamin Franklin was, in 2015, “ one of the largest container ships” with a capacity of 18,000 TEU. Note, it did not claim to be the largest even five years ago. I’m sure more google will reveal more current data.
An article in Smithsonian a year or so ago indicated plans to build ships in the 27K-28K TEU capacity. I do not find indication that ships that size have been launched. It takes a while from proposal to launch as we all know, but shipbuilding capacity, port capacity, canal capacity, alongside depths, crew training, propulsion systems- everything goes up geometrically, and possibly the economics just don’t work out. That would be just fine by me. I don’t think bigger ships mean safer ships from all perspectives. Even though few of us here are actual seamen or involved in the commercial aspects of shipping, we are all peripherally involved in what happens with ships. Remember the Exxon Valdez or the Amoco Cadiz?

[CaptTom]

Originally Posted by Mickeyrouse

I don’t think bigger ships mean safer ships from all perspectives. Even though few of us here are actual seamen or involved in the commercial aspects of shipping, we are all peripherally involved in what happens with ships. Remember the Exxon Valdez or the Amoco Cadiz?

Right, they get bigger every year and even Wikipedia can't always keep up. Still, if one person is talking about "containers" and another about "TEUs" then we all risk misunderstanding each other.

As for safety, I'm not sure that's much higher than aesthetics on the designer's minds. These things are built to carry the maximum amount of cargo for the lowest possible cost. If you think it's bad now, just wait until they all go autonomous.

[Mickeyrouse]

You’re right about apples versus oranges communication. Apparently you know that “container” can mean either the twenty foot box (Twenty foot equivalent unit) or the forty foot box ( forty foot equivalent unit.) I didn’t learn until recently that though most container loads are overwhelmingly 40 ft. units, the carrying capacity of ships is expressed in TEU’s, the smaller box.
Then there are the liquid vessels mounted in container frames, that appear also to be TEU. Those things scare me. As we all have observed through the years comparatively(!) benign bulk cargoes are transported in ULCC or VLCC tankers. You know, “safe” products like crude oil, or gasoline, jet fuel, etc.
But what’s in those small vessels? Their small size seems to say “concentrated, and potent.” You know, something like the old tetraethyl lead. When a container ship loses several boxes, at some point those things will be included. The loss of the 2,000+ boxes referenced in this thread included more than 60 boxes identified by the shipping line as dangerous cargo. I don’t think they meant AK-47’s. Meanwhile, they are in the North Pacific, as seawater begins its inexorable corrosion and ultimate release, 50 or more years from now.