Hacker News Reader

Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

According to a study from CargoNet the total theft of cargo containers in 2022 was 1,778 units for a total of about $220m. By comparison about 10,000 cargo containers fall off of ships every year.

The problem is well below the threshold where anyone would pay a dollar more per container to deal with it.

View on HN

‘Falls off ships’ is a pretty convenient excuse.

Maybe it is used as an excuse, but it really does happen regularly [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/17qp82w/cargo_ship_ap...

Sometimes the ocean and seas are not friendly.

If you look around you can probably find an outlet store that sells things such as goods from containers that were dropped at port, pallets that were crushed, etc.

It’s not worth retrieving them from the sea, but anytime they get damaged on land the insurance company ends up owning the remains and auctions it off.

> By comparison about 10,000 cargo containers fall off of ships every year.

Is that big number due to catastrophic failures of entire vessels sinking, or is it more like "whoopsy these goods fell off the truck *wink*" sorta fraud?

> Is that big number due to catastrophic failures of entire vessels sinking

No, it's literally because containers fall off the ship and are lost at sea. Total losses of vessels are very rare.

Large container ships carry huge stacks of containers, sometimes as high as 8-10 containers above the deck. While the containers are locked together to keep them from moving, they can still fall off during storms.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/06/when-shipping-...

The key is that they can fit way more than 10,000 extra containers a year, and companies like Walmart are perfectly fine paying a fraction of the cost of an internal protected container for one that has a chance of disappearing.

Many lightweight items are more expensive to ship than the manufacture.

~200 million containers are shipped a year, and some do actually fall overboard from the ship.

So your saying a container salvage company would be more profitable? :-)

There is probably a lot more money in that. The cargo will still be an insurance loss, but recovery of loads that can cause damage to marine environments are subject to mandatory reporting and fines.

If you could build a device to detect the potential for conditions leading to parametric rolling and warn crews to make adjustments I would invest in that.

https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/what-is-parametr...

Interesting article! This would certainly be amenable to signal processing algorithms if you could get reliable wave height/frequency data. I suspect flying a kite doing SAR above and behind the ship (looking forward) would likely be to complicated.

I was thinking more along the lines of a ship that was outfitted with a container retrieval bay sailing back and forth along the trade routes.

Retrieval is the easy part. Locating the containers (which are often not found to be missing until arriving at port) is a MH370 scale problem.

I could believe that, that also presumes that they stay reasonably close to the surface. If they sink in the Pacific retrieval would be very unlikely.

The containers would be flooded with saltwater. Unless the container was literally full of gold (or similar), the contents are irrepairably damaged and worthless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com