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> By comparison about 10,000 cargo containers fall off of ships every year. Is that big number due to catastrophic failures of entire vessels sinking, or is it

• duskwuff 3y ago
  > Is that big number due to catastrophic failures of entire vessels sinking No, it's literally because containers fall off the ship and are lost at sea. Total losses of vessels are very rare. Large container ships carry huge stacks of containers, sometimes as high as 8-10 containers above the deck. While the containers are locked together to keep them from moving, they can still fall off during storms. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/06/when-shipping-containers-sink-in-the-drink https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/06/when-shipping-...
  • bombcar 3y ago
    The key is that they can fit way more than 10,000 extra containers a year, and companies like Walmart are perfectly fine paying a fraction of the cost of an internal protected container for one that has a chance of disappearing. Many lightweight items are more expensive to ship than the manufacture.
• snypher 3y ago
  ~200 million containers are shipped a year, and some do actually fall overboard from the ship.