Since the end of November last year, a Japanese container ship sailing from Yantian, China to Long Beach, U.S. about 1,800 containers crashed into the sea, another cargo ship executing the China-U.S. route encountered a similar accident.
In less than two months, there have been a number of accidents, and the number of containers that crashed into the sea is not a small increase compared to previous years, raising concerns. Some experts believe that the North Pacific winter would have been prone to extreme weather, if the ship to reduce the speed, is able to overcome a problem. But the current international container shipping market is unprecedentedly hot, soaring freight prices, a hard to find. Shipping companies can only ask the container ship as full as possible, while maintaining high speed, in order to improve the turnover rate and increase capacity.
A.P. Moller-Maersk Group (A.P. Moller-Maersk), a multinational shipping giant headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, issued a statement on January 21, local Time, saying that on January 16, the Maersk Essen cargo ship from Xiamen, China, to Los Angeles, the United States (MaerskEssen), lost about 750 containers en route.
Maersk Essen official pictureThe Maersk Essen is expected to be in LazaroCardenas, Mexico, on January 29 for cargo inspection, port operations and repairs.
Maersk said the ship was under the Danish flag. The company, for its part, has notified the U.S. Coast Guard, the flag state and relevant national government agencies following the accident. “We consider this to be a very serious situation and we will investigate it promptly and thoroughly.”
The Wall Street Journal noted that there have been several incidents in recent months in which large numbers of containers have fallen overboard. For example, on the evening of Nov. 30 last year, the container ship ONEAPUS was en route from Yantian Port in Shenzhen, China, to Long Beach, California, when it suddenly encountered a strong storm cell about 1,600 nautical miles northwest of Hawaii, generating strong winds and huge swells that caused the container stack to collapse and the containers to fall overboard. .
The containers on the bow and stern and the middle of the One Apus collapsed, the middle being the most serious.Subsequently, Japan Marine News said that a total of 1,816 containers were presumed to have fallen overboard. Among them, 64 containers contained dangerous goods, namely 54 containers of fireworks, 8 containers of batteries and 2 containers of liquid ethanol.
On Dec. 31 last year, a container ship managed by Taiwan Evergreen Marine Corp. lost about 40 containers in the waters off the coast of Japan on its way across the Pacific Ocean. Earlier this month, 76 containers fell off a cargo ship from South Korea to North America operated by Israel’s ZIMIntegrated Shipping Services Ltd.
The Wall Street Journal said that the loss of containers in bad weather is relatively rare, but accidents are on the rise this winter, especially in the Pacific. According to a report by the World Shipping Council (WorldShippingCouncil) last July, an average of 1,382 containers went missing at sea each year from 2008 to 2019. But in the past two months, about 3,000 containers have gone missing at sea.
Behind this, bad weather in the Pacific, increased voyages due to high freight rates, and increasingly large cargo ships are the main reasons.
Bloomberg said that container ships are full of cargo sailing from China to the United States this year as freight rates for international shipping soared to record highs and major companies needed to restock their inventories.
Clive Reed, founder of Reed Marine Marine Management Consulting, told Bloomberg that winter in the North Pacific would have been marked by extreme weather, as well as rough seas. Meanwhile, large container freighters are sailing at top speed. If cargo ships slow down, they can overcome the problems caused by hull bumps and bad weather.
But Reid said: “The current tariff is high, commercial pressure to let the ship can only arrive on time, in order to increase the number of voyages. Schedules are so tight that shipowners have very little room to deploy.”
Other professionals told the Wall Street Journal that the reason beyond these may be related to the failure of the ship’s container strapping system. As ships get larger and containers are stacked like high-rise buildings, the stability of the ships may be subject to greater bumping and swaying stress.
Greek shipbuilding engineer Pagoulatos (Fotis Pagoulatos) said this phenomenon is called “parametricrolling” (parametricrolling), often occurring when the wave is not frontal, but at an angle against the bow of the ship. As the waves ebb and flow, the ship begins to sway, which, combined with the normal lurching of the ship as it moves forward, may cause the container to shift.
Lars Jensen, CEO of Denmark’s SeaIntelligence Consulting (SeaIntelligence Consulting), also said that shipping needs have been high recently, with ships’ cargo filling up. The higher the container base, the greater the force they are subjected to in the ship’s sway, the more likely it is to cause a fall.
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