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Uncontained Ocean
Thu Jan 27, 2005
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 U.S. by container. There are up to 3,000 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 '90s.
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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