Container ships keep getting bigger. But as the economies of scale grow, so do the risks.
Big ships can cause big problems. In 2021, the huge container ship Ever Given twisted sideways in the Suez Canal, blocking a crucial trade passage between Europe and Asia. For almost a week, this firmly lodged ship captivated a pandemic-weary world that responded with wild theories and wilder memes. But there was a real-world impact as well: The trade traversing the canal was worth up to $10 billion daily.
These large ships are a long way from the world’s first successful container ship, a converted steamship that traveled from New Jersey to Texas in 1956. Container ships slowly increased in size for decades after that, before suddenly leaping significantly in size over the past 20 years, forcing ports and canals to adapt, often at the cost of billions of dollars. But new shipping technology and the logic of economies of scale meant ships got bigger and bigger.
Last year, after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel led to a huge assault on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, the Yemeni militant group known as the Houthis began attacking container ships and oil tankers in the Bab al-Mandab Strait. The attacks effectively cut off access to the Red Sea, and with it the Suez Canal, leading numerous freight shippers to reroute their voyages south around Africa’s southern tip, adding 10 days onto the average one-way trip.
The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is just one potential choke point for global shipping. On the other side of the Arabian Peninsula lies the Strait of Hormuz, where tensions between Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and commercial ships regularly flare. There’s the Black Sea, where Russia has been able to block numerous shipments of Ukrainian grain since the war it invaded its neighbor in February 2022.
Asia is a particularly worrisome region when it comes to shipping. This year, labor organizations in the United States wrote to the Biden administration to petition for trade relief for the U.S. shipbuilding industry, noting that Chinese-built ships, many of them enormous megaships built by state-owned companies, now dominated global maritime trade. As the Financial Times’s Rana Foroohar wrote this month, “America has essentially stopped building its own ships” over the past few decades.
As the Financial Times observed, the ship “flew the flag of Belize, was partly managed by a Beirut-based ship management company, was on a voyage organized by another Lebanese operator and had a mostly Syrian crew.”
United Kingdom Latest News, United Kingdom Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
The global risks caused by bigger and bigger container shipsContainer ships keep getting bigger. But as the economies of scale grow, so do the risks.
Read more »
Baltimore bridge collapse: What's known about the container ship involvedThe cargo ship that crashed into the Key Bridge in Baltimore lost power and issued a mayday call moments before, the governor said. Here’s what is known about the ship that caused the major accident.
Read more »
Baltimore Key bridge collpase: Everything you need to know about Dali, the container ship which collidedHere’s what to know about the cargo ship that crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, causing it to collapse and leaving six construction workers presumed dead. If stood upright, the Dali would reach almost to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris or about two-thirds of the way up the Empire State Building in New York.
Read more »
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy says container ship recorder has been recoveredJennifer Homendy said a small team boarded the vessel late Tuesday night.
Read more »
Here's what we know about the Singapore-flagged container ship that hit the Baltimore bridgeThe container ship, known as the Dali, had previously been involved in a minor incident in Belgium’s Port of Antwerp.
Read more »
Missing woman trapped in shipping container for days found after banging on doorA missing woman was found alive and safe on Thursday after banging on the door of a shipping container she was trapped in.
Read more »