Global Container Loss Doubles, Nearly 3000 Containers Lost At Sea Within 90 Days

This year Maersk has been involved in 2 containers lost at sea incidents involving 2 of its Containerships. The incidents happening within weeks of each other have resulted in the loss of 1010 containers cumulatively.

The latest incident involving the 13100 teu Maersk Eindhoven lost 260 containers. The global container loss has nearly reached 3000 in the transpacific route since November. The latest incident happened 45 nautical miles north of Japan in the middle of the Pacific on February 17. Along with the 260 lost containers, 65 more were damaged.

Earlier another ship Maersk Essen lost 750 containers in the transpacific heavy weather on 16th January. Both these ships are sister ships operating in the transpacific Asia US route and belong to the Maersk Edinburgh class registered in Denmark.

Representation Image – Credits: Twitter

A similar loss was encountered by ONE Apus which lost 1816 containers in the transpacific back in November last year. Other small incidents caused the loss of 153 containers.

Cumulatively, from November to February 2979 containers were lost at sea which was double the annual average of container loss, says a World Shipping Council statistics.

This comes at a time when container ships are flocking at US ports fueled by a cargo boom after the pandemic slowdown. The January imports in the US stands at 518,000 TEUs which is 60% of the container import throughout of the US ports last year.

Reference: xinhuanet.com