I’m reminded if the New Carissa incident. To avoid paying multi-thousand $$$ fees to have the longshoremen’s union labor open the hatches in port, the shop’s captain opened them as they sat anchored offshore. A storm came up, and the open hatches acted as sails, driving the ship into a beach.
The whole container shipping industry is also the most abusive industry towards most of its workers, who live and work on the ships for months at a time, with no visas to go ashore in the ports they stop at, and usually waiting till they make harbor at a designated port before they get paid, if they make it to that port. Then when failiures happen crews get stranded on board as the registered owner, the operator, and some foreign country they are stranded offshore of argue about who must pay what to whom.
The U.S. gave up very much control of the situation when it quit requiring ships using U.S. ports to be U.S. flagged ships. The country of registry is supposed to have most of the authority over the owners/operators of the ship.
These are the countries with the most ships in their registry:
—————Gross tonnage-Deadweight tonnage—Vessel count
Panama——225,002,749——333,442,374————9,367
Liberia-——171,472,522——270,181,504————4,027
Marshall——162,694,278——261,236,163————4,163
Islands
Hong Kong-128,080,233——202,679,275————2,707
Singapore-—97,816,315——145,871,414————4,962
Malta———80,706,544——115,614,647————2,637
Bahamas——65,445,388-——80,190,369————1,512
China———58,261,571-——87,463,456————4,881
Greece-——40,320,446-——70,047,642————1,545
Japan———29,697,186-——44,799,445————3,846
And here are top container shipping companies with only one U.S. company ranked 28 out of the top 30:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_shipping_companies
And what should piss Americans off about it all is exports and imports are so important to our economy, yet we have so little say so in most of getting it done.