LONG BEACH, Wash. (AP) — From clothes to metals used for manufacturing, most of the world’s everyday goods and raw materials moved over long distances are...
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.Sometimes hundreds of shipping containers are lost at once in storms or wrecks. Sometimes just a few containers go overboard.
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 arrives safely,” said Ian Lennard, president of the National Cargo Bureau.
“We are leaving time capsules on the bottom of the sea of everything we buy and sell – sitting down there for maybe hundreds of years,” he said.Debris that washed ashore in Long Beach, Washington, matched items lost off the giant cargo ship ONE Apus in November 2020. When the ship hit heavy swells on a voyage from China to California, nearly 2,000 containers slid into the Pacific.
Hemantha Withanage remembers how the beach near his home smelled of burnt chemicals. Volunteers soon collected thousands of dead fish, gills stuffed with chemical-laced plastic, and nearly 400 dead endangered sea turtles, more than 40 dolphins and six whales, their mouths jammed with plastic. “It was like a war zone,” he said.
Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a maritime intelligence company that’s tracked thousands of marine accidents on container ships over the past decade, told AP that underreporting is rampant. Marine insurers, which are typically on the hook to pay for mishaps, likely have access to more complete data on losses – but no laws require that data to be collected and shared publicly.
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