Shipping Fee Not Included in This Container Quiz

Answer: falling off the ship

"Container loss" as it is called, has been a phenomenon since the 1950s, and although all of those causes contribute to container loss, falling off the ship is the most common, which they consider falling under the umbrella of going down with the ship if it sinks.

Another cause of "container loss" is getting blown up in an act of war. There are 6,000 container ships on the ocean at any given moment, some of them with up to 20,000 containers. About 250 million containers are transported yearly. Given the number of equipment and human errors, hurricanes, rogue waves, shallow reefs, squalls and swells, it's no wonder that a number of these containers will go overboard. I wonder if a container ship carrying vegetables sinks, was it because of the leeks?

Answer: 75% of the cost of transporting goods by water was while the ship was in port

When calculating wages and equipment used, 75% of the shipping costs were while the ship was still in port being loaded up or unloaded. The distinction between those workers in port was that stevedores worked on the ship while longshoremen worked on the docks. Commodities like oil, which can be poured into barrels, were relatively easy to transport, whereas "break-bulk" were more time-consuming and labor-intensive because they had to be loaded item by item, loaded carefully so that they wouldn't shift in transit or break. Trucking magnate Malcolm McLean initially thought it would simplify things if he could just have his trucks driven onto the cargo ships, but it proved to be more costly than he thought.

Answer: "I'd like to sink that..."

That Longshoremen bigwig actually followed up his statement, "I'd like to sink that..." with more colorful language, but the point is he realized he was seeing the future and it did not look great for the employment levels of dockworkers. In addition to retrofitting those tankers, Mr. McLean worked with an engineer to build shipping containers that could be easily lifted by crane and loaded from truck to ship.

McLean's cargo ship, the SS Ideal-X, carried 58 containers. Before that trek, the average cost to load a ship was $5.83 per ton, but after McLean's innovations the price dropped to about 16 cents a ton. Shipping containers these days are made of steel and the dimensions are 8 feet by 8 1/2 feet, by 20 or 40 feet long.

Answer: LEGO

LURPs and BURPs are Little Ugly Rock Pieces, and Big Ugly Rock Pieces according to Lego fans. Of those 62 overboard containers, one was from Lego that had 4,756,940 pieces in total, including those Lego dragon pieces. Helicopter pilots overhead reported seeing essentially a Lego slick in the Celtic Sea.

Answer: Ultra Large Container Vessel

The size of even the small vessels still sounds huge, about 400 feet from bow to stern, about the length of a baseball field. The shipping industry calls those "small" ships Feeders. They next size up is a Feedermax, and then comes a Panamax (965 feet long), which was the maximum size that could make its way through the Panama Canal.

But the largest vessel is the Ultra Large Container Vessel at 1,300 feet long. That's longer than the Chrysler Building in New York City is tall. That ship might carry close to 25,000 containers, but with a crew of only 25 workers.

Answer: International Maritime Organization

Depending on which waters the "catastrophic event" (50 or more containers overboard) or lesser event occurs, it can be difficult to know which authority to go to because the different areas within oceans are divided up into various gerrymander-like jurisdictions overseen by various countries and signatories, with various treaties and sorts of enforcement.

The International Maritime Organization has drawn up an agreement dictating a mandatory system of reporting such container losses. Another source for data about container loss comes from the World Shipping Council which has conducted surveys about container loss and cites that an average of 1,382 containers go overboard yearly, but there is some doubt about that figure for reasons such as insurance companies reluctant to report to full losses they cover. Nor do shipping companies enjoy reporting the truth, and in both cases it's because it would make both entities seem less profitable.

Answer: alarmingly rising rate of piracy on the high seas

Piracy in the oceans is actually at the lowest rate it's been in 30 years. In 2021, the reported 132 pirate attacks were the lowest since 1994. The rate of piracy has been decreasing almost steadily since 2002. High winds and storms have been on the rise in frequency and intensity with climate change.

There has been a trend toward using larger container ships, which has also meant higher stacks of containers which catch the wind, and make the ship more susceptible to rolling and tilting. Covid 19 has led to a sharp rise in demand for goods, and thusly, container ships are loaded to full capacity, and crews are faced with stricter timetables than previously, which has led to attempting to sail through storms instead of around them. Working conditions for crew were never great but they've become even more dangerous leading to human error, and crews trapped in ports because of worldwide shipping traffic jams. One more contributing factor has been containers being in short supply leading to the use of older containers with older locking mechanisms.

Answer: Tens of thousands of cookbooks

The public learned of this container loss when it made headlines, perhaps because it opened the opportunity for the jokes. In January 2022, a container ship called The Madrid Bridge, heading to New York from Singapore lost 65 containers overboard, including tens of thousands of newly printed cookbooks of "Turkey and the Wolf" by Mason Hereford, and "Dinner in One" by Melissa Clark. "The Guardian's" headline read "Recipe for disaster: first runs of two new cookbooks lost at sea." "The Post and Courier" had a similar headline, but "Wine Spectator" came up with something different: "Flotsam and Chefsam: Thousands of Cookbooks Lost at Sea." Luckily, the sinking of all those books didn't cause...a title wave.

Answer: the itemized list of what a container is carrying

While workers on aircraft carriers, fishing boats, and oil tankers know of course what they're transporting, container ships container literally millions upon millions of different items in their roughly 5,000 containers, making inspection of each and everything impossible, good news for drug cartels, human trafficking and terrorists.

There is however, a list of items that each container is supposedly carrying, the bill of lading, which is known to the shipowner, the sender and receiver. If a container goes overboard, the insurance agents and lawyers are notified, and if great many containers take the plunge, a seemingly illogical and old maritime law from 533 A.D. kicks in: everyone with a container still onboard is required to help share payment the expenses.

The reasoning way back when the law was codified was that if the crew had to toss cargo overboard from a ship in trouble, they couldn't afford the time to spend on picking and choosing the cargo that would cost the least.

Answer: Nike athletic shoes

Sponges float at first but as they soak up water they reach a point where they sink. Champs Sports doesn't include boomerangs among their sporting goods for sale. Most charcoal briquettes sink in water and dissolve relatively quickly. In 1990 a container ship heading to The U.S. from Korea, lost tens of thousands of Nikes overboard. Each shoe had a serial number. Mr. Ebbesmeyer enlisted the aid of BBC journalist Mario Cacciotttolo and author Tracey Williams and put the word out for beachcombers the world over to report any of the Nike shoes that washed ashore.

The shoes floated very easily and didn't succumb to the salt water very much, resulting in long journeys. But here's the interesting thing: because the left and right shoes orient differently, the wind caught each shoe differently, and so as it turned out, some beaches found a whole lot of right foot Nike shoes, while other beaches found a whole lot of left foot Nikes wash ashore.

This spurred Ebbesmeyer's study of "flotsametrics" and other container ship debris such as a 1992 container loss of plastic bath toys including one that took 26 years to find a shore. Mr. Ebbesmeyer and Ms. Williams also studied the Lego event which led to her writing the 2022 book, "Adrift: The Curious Tale of the LEGO Lost at Sea."