Shipping containers are falling overboard at a rapid rate (opens in new tab)

Yes, absolutely. It absolutely hammered home for me the extreme value potential of even (seemingly) small logistical changes.

It reminds me of a quote about warfare: "Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics"

On a related note, there is an episode of Connections that ties the width of the early railcar's wheelbase to pretty much all subsequent forms of transportation, ending with modern space exploration capability. Pretty awesome to observe the actual reach of decisions made long ago.

It’s one of the best books I’ve read in the last 10 years. The discussion about the traffic to the Manhattan docks by itself was wild.

They should just build pipelines.

Home by Bill Bryson - not the first thing you might think of but tells fascinating story of Frederick Tudor who spent a fortune in 1840s taking ice from Lake Wenham in New York State and persuading the world you could refrigerate food from America across the Atlantic.

With the completion of the Erie Canal, buffalo, cattle and wheat from the Great Plains could arrive in Chicago, be butchered, kept in giant ice warehouses then shipped in box cars and boats lined with ice across the lakes, down the canal, out NY harbour and across to a Europe that was experiencing a massive population growth (1848 revolutions).

This first wave of globalisation dropped food prices globally causing (by the 1870s) massive economic collapses and shifts away from failing farmlands. British landed gentry never recovered, and the links to WWI are clear.

The US civil war would have been very different without the Erie canal if the worlds food supply went south down the Missiippi to get out to the Atlantic

All because someone liked Christoph in Frozen and want to sell ice.

Bryson is a brilliant author and this one of his best.

99pi's podcast episode on "Reefers" (refrigerated containers)

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/reefer-madness/

There's been a fair bit written about how Walmart leveraged incredible logistics to achieve its retail dominance, not unlike Amazon doing the same in the online world. I've also come across interesting work on how Dell helped change consumer computing with Just in Time supply chains.

There's no reason to suspect that we'll see two more 250+ crate loss accidents this year leading to results like your graph predicts.

In the 1990s, a ship from Hong Kong bound for Tacoma, Washington lost a shipping container that was filled with 30,000 yellow duckies.

Oceanographers were able to collaborate with beachcombers in the western US (and eventually as far away as the UK) to validate their models of how the currents would move the ducks.

In Houston, we call that a Tuesday

Thankyou for the poetry!

Thats a very old tradition.

Sometimes local traditon encuraged potential salvage, by setting up false lights.

edit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_(shipwreck)

but wikipedia actually says, this might be a urban legend, as there is no clear evidence this ever happened

Okay, who's joining me for an expedition? Finders keepers, right?

And made sure it was installed in every government building. Otherwise productivity would suffer.

I saw somewhere that for loading the outer/upper containers are lighter ones, and generally consumer grade plastic crap (toys, shoes, etc). same video shows loads of this stuff arriving on the shores of Oregon, USA - just a little waterlogged.

> 3000 containers/year is a pretty small drop in the ocean

Exactly. Single ship holding 30k loosing 10 means just 0.03%... It's nothing.

> drop in the ocean

cough

The President of the United States, 2 days ago: "We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century."

The leading global purveyor of DEMOCRACY is deeply embedded in the dangerous game you describe

The summary of her dissertation is really interesting, thanks for sharing! But I think OP's point was "countries who trade with each other are less likely to go to war", not "countries who trade with each other never go to war". And I think OP is right.

"So war does not necessarily stop trade. And thus trade is no prophylactic to war." Seatbelts do not stop people dying in car accidents. But seatbelts do reduce the chances of dying in a car accident. I know I'm being pedantic, but it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. Even a prophylactic that works 1% of the time is better than nothing.

That freight didn’t so much fall overboard as get pushed.

Well, alternatively, the war was (in large part) triggered by Britain _restricting_ open trade via the stamp act / granting a monopoly on tea imports to a single company.

That’s not really relevant given the fact the the colonies were subjects of Britain not just their trading partner. It is a little different.

That trading partner wasn’t a democracy. King George has a pretty famous quote acknowledging that if George Washington actually gave up power (as the Presidency required) it would make him the greatest man in the World.

Agreed, physical conflict is basically just an extreme form of negotiation, and it will continue as long as it's potentially profitable to the aggressor. "The idea is to apply kinetic force to the other group until its behaviour changes as desired."

> Some blame may lie with those who tell the computer how tall it should stack the containers

Computers do NOT make the stowage layout. The stowage layout is the responsibility of stowage planners. The captain of the ship has final say. There are various computer programs that assist with the stowage layout. However, they are _not_ sufficient. If you'd take out the stowage planner the shipping company would have a lot of additional costs. These programs do help to check for loads of problems, plus the initial inefficient stowage plan.

How tall something is stacked is too simplistic. What matters is that it isn't stacked as a box. Further, certain twist locks cannot handle too much wind.

Source: used to sit next to a stowage planner, who'd be in the office around 1x/month. The planner mostly talked during these visits.

I think any future generations will likely have more advanced technologies for finding stuff.

And hopefully somebody figures out how to find my glasses.

>>stroke of luck

I'm sure that that's how we've found lots of really old stuff and continue to do so. Just imagine all the stuff that we haven't found yet.

I see it now, future oceanic archeologists uncover the container and publish an article about a long lost undersea civilization that used container as part of an religious site where they made offerings to their gods as part of a ritual. It will remain a mystery as to why the civilization left the site and disappeared but the team will be soliciting more funding to continue its research.

My container (used for land-based storage) has obviously seen travel, and has nothing beyond a couple corner air vents. None of the other containers I'm familiar without here (they're quite popular for storage) have anything of the sort. That valve is a nice idea, but doesn't really exist in most of the fleet of containers on the ocean.

They are, indeed, a hazard for other boats, though they generally won't "lurk below the surface." Either they're floating from buoyancy of what's in them, or they sink. The increasing water pressure as you descend makes "floating below the surface" a particularly unstable place.

Perhaps some new ones do, but generally most containers have nothing of the sort:

"Depending on whether they are full or empty, and on the nature of the cargo inside, containers may float at the surface for several days or weeks prior to sinking. Containers are not generally entirely watertight; while an empty container is likely to sink due to water ingress, a full container will likely float until air trapped in the cargo has escaped.’"

From the article, it seems that container losses don't generally happen one at a time, but rather you have some event where a ship loses hundreds at once. I guess if you're quick maybe you could get a ship in and scoop them up before they sink, but in order to save more than a few you'd need a big ship and most of the time you'd just be sitting around waiting for the next container loss event, and the ship would sit idle for months or years.

I'm assuming that if it sinks in deep water it's gone, but even there maybe there's an opportunity to salvage containers off the sea floor with the right equipment. Probably not worthwhile economically, but who knows?

Maybe the best case for this could be made for ships that normally at sea doing other things to be ready to divert from their ordinary tasks to collect containers if they don't have anything more pressing. (Coast Guard ships or Navy support vessels perhaps?)

Selling on eBay is theft. The contents if those containers belongs to someone. You can possibly make a living recovering the container for the owner, but if you don't agree to a price beforehand the lawyers will make a killing in court deciding what you should get.

Airplane luggage is lost quite often as well. And carry on luggage is very limited.

I wonder how many other hazards are out there. I have feeling it's small fraction compared to something like tree logs or g*d knows what else.

Robert Redford in “All is Lost”.

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