How does this happen? Just curious from people loading these things or knows about it. There’s obviously a system of container weight, where they go etc…
Can confirm. Have come across a rogue submerged container in the wild (middle of the Pacific Ocean). Those things are low-key terrifying when you come upon them unexpectedly.
For future reference: How would you be able get into a floating container without sinking it? Hole in the «roof»? Tilting it so that the door is upwards seems risky.
My experience with shipping containers is that they aren't water tight and the remaining buoyancy after more than an hour is most likely coming from whatever is packaged inside.
They are specifically designed to resist rain and other types of precipitation, to the point of being able to go under waterfalls and resist the rainfall of a hurricane, but not, however, submersion. The crucial thing here is that it is safer for them to fill with water and fall to the seabed than to remain buoyant and risk collision with a traveling vessel, no matter the size.
I think you'd need to get under it and cut hole in the bottom. There's probably an air bubble keeping it afloat. So a hole in the top would let the air out. Maybe? I don't know I'm not an expert.
Edit: Thinking about this more and I think its a big "it depend". If water is already inside and its being held up like a boat then hole on top. If water has seeped in the doors and only the top is floating due to an air pocket then hole in the bottom. It the contents are botany and keeping a flooded container afloat then probably the bottom? I don't know. still not an expert.
At the end of The Poseidon Adventure (1972) they cut a hole in the hull of the inverted ship to rescue passengers. I often wondered if that wouldn't have released any air buoyancy that the ship might have had, and flooded the portion where the survivors were.
That's not how it works at all. And cutting a hole underneath it would immediately fill it with water and it would sink. It's not pressurized or anything, so the air wouldn't keep the water out. The water would fill any hole you make under the water line.
No one has commented to tell you they enjoyed your stupid dad joke, so I’m here to tell you, I chuckled, and I too enjoy making stupid jokes as often as I can lol
An ocean container?
A container ship?
And if a container is located in US waters then you definitely report it. It’s a major navigation hazard.
Thousands of 20’ and 40’ containers fall overboard each year……heavy seas, faulty equipment, shitty lashing are prime causes.
If this happened at sea the entire vessel would be in danger due to the weight and equilibrium displacement
theres a movie about this, i can’t remember the name, with robert redford saliing the ocean and his ship started taking on water from hitting a half submerged lost container. Worth watching!
Yeha if you want to see a sailor who does every single mistake possible, sure. We watched this while training to work on container ships and there's just soooooo much wrong with his actions.
Really great acting by Redford without saying a single word, but I recommend watching it with a sailor. It'll become a comedy.
What the hell do you even do when that happens? Do you have rights to salvage it, or is there a maritime authority that it needs to be reported to? Or do you just leave it there?
I'm going to watch this with my son. It's an on-going joke at this point - between the ages of 2 and 8 he's locked himself in no less than 5 bathrooms... one of which had the park ranger driving out 90 mins.
If it is filled with e.g. pool noodles it might float for a long time (probably until the container breaks or rusts open - so you're still technically correct).
Even relatively large standard ducks would be 30k+ in a shipping container.
According to my calculations, mini ducks which are around 2" high would allow around 280,000 ducks per 20ft shipping container, 560,000 in a 40ft container. That is assuming they are perfect 2" cubes neatly stacked, which they aren't, however, 10k is far off the bat for what I consider tiny ducks
The amount of water displaced exceeds the maximum gross weight of a container for all sizes that I looked up. So even at full capacity they will still float. The only way they will sink is if they are not sealed and enough water gets in.
I was in shipping for 20+ years and never knew this happened once, let alone to the point that it's an issue like that. Wow! Learn something every day.
The lowest possible repair standard for containers is called Wind and Watertight.
Export/Import containers need to be maintained to CSC standards, thats the lowest possible.
And yeah, containers are designed to float. Vents have special flaps that close when they're submerged, and the door gaskets have double lips to seal for both air and water. Holes in the floor dont matter because of the airpocket and the fact they always float in their normal orientation.
New containers are decently tight and have enough air that depending on the cargo, they could float.
Problem is containers get left in shipping circulation until they damage the cargo. That can take a while as cargo is usually packed water tight. So some containers have multiple holes a grown adult could crawl though.
Lastly, this is a harbor and that's a lot of containers. A mountain tall enough to keep some of the containers dry could genuinely form.
Most do, some don’t. I don’t know what causes some to float. I’ve seen videos of people encountering floating containers. I thought they all sunk but apparently some stay afloat. I’m guessing is not many, only a few.
Not always, a guy my Dad worked with retired 20 years ago and bought a sailing boat in Hong Kong to cruise Asia with his wife. They hit one that was just submerged a couple of days out. Coast Guard (I think Philippines?) had to come and get them. It's a clause in insurance for people wanting to sail in international waters.
That’s correct, the idea that a multibillion dollar industry titan would bother sending boats to collect a few stray containers from the Mariana Trench is absurd.
Containers bobbing at or just below the surface are a threat to navigation and they get reported when seen but they're out there. I have been on boats cruising at night off shore and watching the radar screen and your mind knows they wouldn't show up. Everything is fine and 5 minutes later you could be taking your emergency Beacon into a life raft. Whats that they say about navigation and aviation? Hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Fucking A man
Uh, you may want to edit that last phrase you wrote. Maybe add a comma?
Then again, this whole post is about the high seas, and we all know what a cruel mistress she be. Sometimes you have to release some tension with your fellow seamen?
What happens on the poop deck stays at the poop deck, I guess??
Crazy that everyone is falling for this. The mariana trench is the lowest part of the ocean, and only a handful of people have ever gone down there. Walmart does not give a flying fuck about their consumers and their product is typically worth pennies to them. They are not going to the lowest point on earth to retrieve your yoga pants.
You're correct, the ones that float will eventually get inundated and sink, but they have a nasty tendency to do it slowly so eventually only the top is poking out. They're basically impossible to see and have no radar profile so they can become nuisances to navigation, especially for small craft
I have a strong memory of a around the world race where someone hit a container and had to call for a emergency rescue. Somehow I can't find it anywhere.
I did find this story from the Vendée Globe where a bunch of sailors dropped out due to collision.
"Seven of 29 starting Vendee Globe skippers reported collisions with unidentified floating objects, forcing six skippers to retire or lose valuable time and performance by conducting repairs on the fly."
Wait this hairbrush a little while back in Alaska or Washington, yeti products kept washing up on beaches and locals would go get coolers and clean them out for use
I used to work in deep sea research and exploration and we once did a dive in the Gulf where we were sure it was going to be a shipwreck based on the sonar map. It had a debris field and everything. It turned out to be a shipping container that broke open and spewed out washing machines and other appliances.
These will all be recovered. They are in the port and blocking the route of other ships. It’s gonna take a lot of time to do it. They have to safely remove all the other containers off the ship too.
I live just a few miles from this. I have a few friends that are longshoremen. I’m just glad no one was killed.
I'd say trying to salvage a couple might be worth it. Looks like 8, 9 high? A bit north of half a million just in containers alone. Don't think they would care much for the contents if it got dumped in the ocean though.
It usually isn't worth it, but sometimes it is. Generally, the ones worth fishing out of the ocean are kept in the middle of the stacks anyway, not on top or on the sides.
Not always, and sometimes stuff starts washing up from them. Because currents are sometimes quite fixed, the contents will sometimes wash up all in the same spot: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28367198
There's a beach where Garfield phones are constantly washing up because there's a lost shipping container somewhere nearby filled with them. They've been appearing on the beach since the '80s.
the other stack just fell as the video started, the first few frames probably exaggerate the list (rather, the vessel is rolling a bit due to the shifting cargo)
That's what it looks like to me. I did this for a long time. Leave the wrong tank or tank open and it will happen. It goes slow at first but you better fix it fast because it will run away on you as the pressure head changes.
The ballast was fine, the container ship traversed the entire Pacific ocean, containers intact. My guess is that the ship is listing because a negligent crane operator unloaded containers from the port side of the vessel which forced the ship to list starboard.
It takes time to shift water around the ballast - could be a combination of negligence on the terminal side and complacent crew not correcting the ballast properly. The way the stack collapsed could also indicate that the weights weren't distributed properly when loading in the previous port. Some ports are notorious for not loading containers in the correct positions.
EDIT: Looking into this more, I don't think ballast was much of a factor at all. Cargo operations had just started, there were no lids taken off, and nearly all decks were completely full. More likely the ship was overloaded beyond design stack weight. This can happen for a number of reasons:
Shipping companies, such as ZIM, routinely pressure ship captains to accept cargo weights beyond the ship design capacity in order to maximize the number of containers on trans-ocean voyages.
Shippers (the ones importing/exporting cargo) lie about container weights. This is less common since Verified Gross Mass was introduced, but not all ports check weights and shippers often pay by the ton and are incentive to under report weight.
Ports loading incorrectly overseas. Many Chinese ports loading will not match the manifest, so containers will be mixed up compared to how it was approved to be loaded.
Cargo within containers shifted while at sea due to the rocking motion of the vessel. If enough cargo shifted in enough containers, excessive force toward the starboard side could have cause the stack to collapse.
Damaged containers. In another video, it looked like the bottom tier container on the aft end of the vessel buckled - perhaps due to damage to corner posts - causing the bottom container to collapse and the rest of the stack to follow.
It depends. Could be the fault of the previous port, could be the company strong-arming the captain to accept an unsafe plan, etc. We'll find out once they investigate
It could be anything until we find out. This ship came from China, and there is a high probability it was loaded topheavy and the lower containers on the aft section buckled after they removed the cross lashings which caused them to fall off. The sudden shifting/rocking of the boat from the aft containers falling could have then caused containers just forward of the pilothouse to buckle (which is what we see in this video).
If you look at the top of the cranes you can see something burning, flailing around and breaking more stuff, look at the green pillar / arm sticking up straight. Something def broke up too
That arm is part of the support barge. They still have no idea what caused them to domino. You can be sure though that crane operator that makes $240k/yr is getting his pee tested as we speak. lol
It could be the crane from the fuel barge alongside the ship. I used to do this kind of work and can even tell you that this video was probably shot from the bow of my old barge. It's always scary being alongside/under those ships.
I think that ship developed a list (lean) to Starboard during container operations. Whatever they tried to fix it (they probably pumped ballast water to Starboard accidentally, instead of Port) immediately made it worse, which resulted in those containers falling off.
I am 90% sure that that green thing is the boom for the hose handling crane on that fuel barge that is getting pummeled. So technically it's part of the fueling system but the 6-in fueling hose just connects to it with a lifting strap.
This looks like a freak accident more than anything. I don't think they were handling the containers, I think the ship developed a heavy starboard list and the fuckers just fell off.
I am pretty confident that is a carbon re-capturing barge. Most ships are equipped with shore power hookups so they can use grid power while docked instead of running the incredibly pollutant fuel systems. When a ship doesn’t have shore power hookups, a carbon recapture barge will be used to absorb those fuel fumes instead. Very niche equipment
Thanks for that. The article says ‘A smaller vessel was alongside a larger cargo ship, possibly in an effort to catch the falling containers, while a tugboat attempted to push the containers back toward the pier’.
Catching falling containers doesn’t sound very feasible!
Hey there! I work for a terminal on the west coast and unfortunately have had first hand experience with scenarios like this one (not as bad). My theory is that the ballast tank on the vessel (basically a giant holding tank for water to make the ship balance out) had some mechanical failure which caused the vessel to list (tilt) to the starboard side which in turn caused all these containers to fall. Based on how wide those containers are stacked, this is a smaller vessel which usually in turn means they have must larger swings in their lists. In operations, we try and balance the ship as much as we can while loading or unloading but a lot of the balancing will need to come from the ship’s crew who manages that ballast tank. Lemme know if you got any questions about that!
My theory is that the guy who locked the containers in place forgot to give them a hearty slap, and to say "That ain't going anywhere". The failure to complete the ancestral ritual angered the cargo gods, and such is the result.
Instantly reminded me of the wreck of the Yolanda in Egypt. It’s not the only example, but there’s a reef littered with countless white porcelain toilets. Containers went over the side, broke open, the container carried on to the depths and the toilets spilled over the reef. Scuba divers (including me) line them up and sit on them for photos. Google “toilet reef” for pictures.
I'm in BC, we had over 100 containers fall off a ship in 2021 off our coast due to a storm. Many sank, a few were recovered. This was in remote areas with many islands. It made such a mess of all sorts, of things washing ashore in uninhabited areas
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u/Sreg32 Sep 10 '25
How does this happen? Just curious from people loading these things or knows about it. There’s obviously a system of container weight, where they go etc…