The 1,194-feet-long container ship ONE Apus arrived in Kobe, Japan, on Tuesday (pictured above), eight days after it lost 1,818 containers in a storm 1,600 nm northwest of Hawaii.
It was in the largest weather-related container loss ever. Shipping authorities reported that 64 of the containers are labeled Dangerous Goods, including 54 that carried fireworks, eight with batteries, and two with liquid ethanol.
Each container is 40 feet long. A partly sunken container could easily cause a fatal accident if a recreational or fishing vessel hit it. The U.S. Coast Guard in Hawaii issued a warning to mariners to look out for the containers. None have been sighted so far.
The ship lost the containers during a storm with gale-force winds and seas up to 50 feet. The weather caused the ship to roll heavily. It was on its way from China to Long Beach at the time. The ONE Apus was launched just year and works under a Japanese flag.
The World Shipping Council keeps track of containers lost at sea. It says that over the past 12 years an average of 1,382 containers are lost overboard each year – and that’s not counting “catastrophic incidents” involving more than 50 containers in a single event. Read more:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/1900-shipping-containers-hawaii-dangerous-goods
