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Uncontained Ocean
Fri Dec 19, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for the Weather Notebook. Today, container ships deal with weather at
sea. Robin White has the story.
If you ever see a container ship leave a port with red, black or green containers stacked six
high on the deck from one end to the other you might wonder what happens when they get into
bad weather. Dick Cramer is a captain for APL. Standing on his ship The President Wilson in
the Port of Oakland he says it can be a bit of a problem...
DC: Even if you're in rough weather that the ship can handle maybe the cargo can't. If you
got a load of televisions and such you really can't be banging them too hard.
Containers carry everything imaginable. Cars, computers, food. Entire racks of clothing ready
to roll out onto the showroom floor. Everything that is made in the Far East or Europe gets
brought to the US by container. There are up to 3000 on the President Wilson alone and each
one can carry goods worth millions of dollars. Waves do the biggest damage to containers.
Sometimes, the bottom one in a stack gets buckled by a big wave.
DC: Of course each container is locked to the one below and if the one below it collapses you
run the risk of loosing the whole lot.
Containers go overboard. Cramer says he's never lost one but some accounts say as many as
10,000 a year do go over the side. 60,000 Nike shoes went over in the North Pacific in 1999
and were washing up in Alaska the next year. A flotilla of rubber ducks is circling the globe
after being lost overboard in a storm in the early nineties.
Robin White reports from San Francisco. Our show is produced in New Hampshire with funding
from Subaru and The National Science Foundation.
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