Quietly ballooning in size
They’re building those things too damn big.
Over the past decade, out of the sight of most consumers, the world’s container ships have been quietly ballooning in size. A class of vessels that carried a maximum of about 5,000 shipping containers in 2000 has doubled in size every few years since, with dozens of megaships now traversing the ocean laden with upwards of 20,000 boxes.
The ocean can deal with it; canals, not so much.
The ships’ rapid growth has outstripped the capacity of marine infrastructure to follow. The Panama canal was expanded at a cost of more than $5bn (£3.6bn) more than a decade ago to meet the size of new container ships – only to be left behind as even larger vessels rolled out of Asian shipyards.
…
The Suez canal has been in the process of expansion to allow for larger ships and two-way traffic at its northern end. But its southern side was still one-way and narrower: vulnerable when one of the largest container ships in the world tried to pass through on a windy morning.
Sometimes economies of scale aren’t.
Updating to add:
Blimey, lots of shipping stuff I can add to!
Imagine you see one of these massive ships just 5 miles away…
Boxboats are measured by the TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit, as the first containers were 20ft by 8ft by 8ft, very quickly raised to 8’6″ high). Maersk, CMA CGM or other investing companies will lease, charter or purchase a ship (most don’t own the ships outright) which could be as much as 24,000 TEU or more. Most companies deliberately never state the TEU or true tonnage in public, for commercial reasons. The vast majority of the containers will be 40ft in length. Hundreds onboard could be refrigerated boxes. We carried anything except crude oil and radioactive materials. Parts of an oil refinery, mega yachts, helicopters, monster trucks: the list was endless. If it could be stuck in a box, or on a flat-bed box, we could haul it.
The standard TEU about twenty years ago was around 3000. There are still smaller ships (in the 1000TEU range) that visit small feeder ports. But then came the trend for getting ever bigger and faster, which needed bigger berths in bigger ports. However, the crew numbers stayed the same or even shrank.
The Panama Canal was a tight squeeze for a 32metre beam ship, leaving just 0.75m either side (lots of scraping, sparks and shredded paint) but they were designed for the locks and called Panamax. Then the canal was widened so that ships 49metres wide can pass through. (This also meant a lot of original-Panamax ships were scrapped early, as they suddenly became obsolete and uneconomical.) New ships were cheap as yards competed, desperate for work, or undercut each other.
The Suez Canal was also quite worrying in winds or low visibility. Both could mean a very busy day for the crew (I used to do at least eighteen hours during a transit of either.)
The sheer size of the biggest ships put off several people I knew, myself included. It seemed inevitable one would be involved in a serious incident. Picture something longer and heavier than a US Navy CVN (aircraft carrier) with just 20 crew onboard, usually just one or two on watch on the bridge, moving at 30mph. It takes five minutes to crash stop one to a halt. Now chuck in a fishing fleet of 300+ small boats, islands, weather factors, other large ships. It could be ‘entertaining’ on some watches.
Or to put it another way. That ship you saw, 5 miles away? It just hit you as you reached this line.
I’ll never see all the boxboats going into or out of Elliott Bay the same way again.
Blancoliro did a video on this.
The ship is 400m long x 45m high above the water line. That gave it a side area of 4 acres presented to (as it happened) a 40 knot cross-wind on the day it ran aground.
Ok I just saw a huge one go past so I looked it up on the tracker, it’s the Yang Ming TARGET, heading for Korea, length overall is 330 meters and width is 48 meters. So, huge, but significantly less huge than the Ever Given. And it’s sailing under the flag of Liberia.