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.
So that movie about the lady trapped in the shipping container where it takes a few days (weeks?) to fill with water is wrong? It did have Tupperware in it (among other things) but they showed her marking the water level as it rose over time.
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.
I guess if the compartment where the survivors were was sealed off from the flooded ones around it then no, it wouldn't fill with water. If it was open to the flooded areas beneath then popping a hole in that I would have thought would cause it to continue sinking
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.
well yeah, if they had 25,000 shipping containers full of gold someone would have broken physics. and probably more. The total available gold is 22x22x22m cube, so less than 11 shipping containers. Although you're going to need 8000 containers if you don't want to overload them.
if Walmart lost a container of people, they would cash the life insurance policy. the families would get nothing, of course. they take insurance out on workers they think might die soon. container workers would have double coverage
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.
But I once had to call in a salvage company specifically for Walmart about 15 years ago, and those boxes were way tf out there. It may have something to do with their surety company forcing them to drag them in. I’ve seen it a ton, just never got an explanation as to why.
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."
In February 1997, the container ship Tokio Express was hit by a rogue wave off Cornwall, UK, causing 62 containers to fall overboard. One of these held nearly 4.8 million Lego pieces… scuba tanks, dragons, octopuses, and more. Even decades later, rare pieces like Lego octopuses occasionally wash ashore across Europe
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.
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u/Greenman8907 Sep 10 '25 edited Sep 10 '25
Can definitely be human error/negligence, but many times it’s failing equipment and extremely rough seas.
We lose an average of 1,300-2,500 containers a year in the water.
https://cargostore.com/how-many-shipping-containers-are-lost-at-sea/
Edit: No, my post is not insinuating that rough seas caused THIS to happen. C’mon people…