Maersk Ship Loses 750 Containers Overboard in Pacific Ocean | Hacker News Reader

Maersk Ship Loses 750 Containers Overboard in Pacific Ocean

wsj.com

33 pointstimr14 comments

On the one hand, 750 feels like a lot of cargo, but the on the other hand, when I look at those pictures of how they load up the ships, it feels like an engineering miracle they don't lose more.

How does 13000 sound? That's the capacity.

So thats about 5% of the total. Largest ones reach nearly 24k. Loosing a few is negligible.

Hitting a container is not that negligible. Vendee Globe had a number of UFO causalities, with a number of boats having to retire, one even breaking in half and sinking (the skipper was saved by one of the other competitors). There is the Jules Verne Trophy going on right now, hitting a container at 40 knots is not going to be pretty and these guys have no support boats around to help (the JVT is a single boat trying to go around the world as fast as possible). Even commercial powered boats are not going to be really happy about hitting a container.

Remember all the talk about how disused satellites might cause problems due to debris? That already happens on the sea.

How do these containers float? Are they sealed so well that no water gets inside?

A container can float up to two weeks - it is almost invisible in the dark or on the radar so a ranger to small boats or yachts...

After Alex had to retire Le Cam is what I vouch for. Amazing race.

That said did any of the participants reported hitting container yet? AFAIK all of their autopilots are equiped deep learning AI infrared cameras for this very reason.

They said most hit ufos. Adding more containers to the sea is definitely not going to help with this problem. Since they still hit things, the infrared magic cameras don't seem to work that well.

According to the World Shipping Council, “Upon review of the results of the twelve-year period (2008-2019) surveyed, the WSC estimates that there were on average a total of 1,382 containers lost at sea each year.”[0]

So this was actually quite a few to lose from one ship!

[0] https://www.bifa.org/news/articles/2020/jul/containers-lost-...

My father knew a guy who was moving back to the states with his family and they apparently lost everything when their container went overboard.

A local between-islands container ship operated by Young Brothers lost a bunch of containers recently off Hawaii Island. It happened just as they were negotiating a substantial rate increase with state regulators, saying without a 40% price hike they wouldn't be able to stay in business. The rate increase passed shortly after the accident, and our local Facebook groups exploded with accusations that the shipping company (or some of its deckhands) had essentially extorted the state. The conspiracy theory was that someone must have had a bunch of insurance on those containers. (I must note again that these were unfounded conspiracy theories with no supporting evidence other than 'convenient timing'). I'm highly skeptical of those claims, but it would be interesting to know if insurance fraud could be contributing to the increase in container losses.

Probably they lost empty containers.

> "Probably they lost empty containers." Why "probably"? The article mentions millions of dollars in cargo and that they haven't even finished doing a full inventory manifest check yet. Are empty containers more likely to be lost overboard? Genuine question, I know nothing about cargo ships.

To pull the centre of weight to the bottom, typically overboard space is used only for empty containers in cargo ships. Otherwise it is very very challenging to keep the vessel stable. Actually mostly impossible.

You might ask why they even carry empty containers, it is because not every loaded container goes back to its source location with other type of goods and cargo ships should always carry empty containers to solve one of the most challenging problems of the industry, which is called „empty container repositioning“. Cargo traffic across different locations of the world is not perfectly balanced. So, for example Chinese should get some empty containers back to load them back and send to Western world :)

Source: I am a Naval Architect by education and worked at cargo ship design and construction for a while.

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