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Two US-flagged container ships under the protection of the US Navy were forced to retreat from a passage of the Red Sea after coming under fire from Houthi terrorists on Wednesday. The US-flagged container ships Maersk Detroit and Maersk Chesapeake were supposed to enter the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and transit the Red Sea under the protection of the US Navy. The US Navy has done this once before. On January 10, a convoy of four US-flagged ships carrying military cargo passed through the Red Sea. It came under a complex attack of 18 suicide drones, two anti-ship cruise missiles, and...

Orderbook ‘sword of Damocles’ will soon hit container market.. Here it comes. An unprecedented flood of new container ships is about to enter service. The pace of deliveries will pick up in earnest next month, surge much higher in the second quarter, go higher still in the second half, even higher throughout 2024, and stay strong in 2025. “The colossal orderbook is like a sword of Damocles hanging over the market, with a raft of new ship deliveries in the next months inevitably triggering a return of overcapacity,” ... Maritime Strategies International (MSI) estimates that deliveries will total 717,900 twenty-foot...

Around the middle of this month, workers at Malaysia's Port Klang were surprised to hear knocking from inside one of the shipping containers that had just come off a ship from Bangladesh. When they opened it, they were even more surprised to see a young boy step out. He couldn't speak the local language, so the port workers couldn't figure out who he was or how he ended up inside the container. They alerted law enforcement agencies, which immediately suspected it was a case of human trafficking. "He was the only one found in the container. A police report was...

Slump in imports, cargo diversions to other ports help shrink queue of dozens of vessels The backup of container ships off Southern California’s coast that was at the heart of U.S. supply chain congestion during the Covid-19 pandemic has effectively disappeared. The queue of ships waiting to unload at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach fell from a peak of 109 ships in January to four vessels this week ... . U.S. import volumes are declining ... The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together handled 686,133 loaded import containers in September, down 18% from a year...

Anchorages continue to fill with waiting container ships off East and Gulf Coast ports, where vessel queues have now far outgrown those off the West Coast. Along all three coasts combined, the number of waiting container vessels remains exceptionally high.There were 125 container ships waiting off North American ports on Friday morning, according to an analysis of ship-tracking data from MarineTraffic and queue numbers from California.Container ship pileup offshore of Savannah, Friday 8 a.m. Map: MarineTrafficThat’s down 16% from 150 waiting ships in January, when West Coast congestion peaked, but up 36% from 92 ships a month ago.The ship queue...

Dozens killed, over 450 injured in Chittagong container depot fire By Sri Lanka Guardian •June 05, 2022 •Bangladesh The number of casualties could increase further by Pimple Barua, Chittagong At least 37 people have been killed and over 450 injured in a fire caused by an explosion at a private Inland Container Depot (ICD) in Sitakunda upazila in Chittagong. The fire broke out at BM Container Depot in Kadamrasul area of the upazila on Saturday night. Chittagong Medical College Hospital (CMCH) Police Outpost Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) Alauddin Talukdar told Bangla Tribune: "The bodies have been kept at the morgue." Istakul...

It is only a matter of time before China's plan to replace the United States as the world's preeminent military becomes reality, a top U.S. general warned, calling on the Washington and its allies to speed efforts to counter Beijing’s bid for dominance. General John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Washington’s second-most-senior military officer, called the rapid rise of the Chinese military “stunning.” “The pace they're moving and the trajectory that they're on will surpass Russia and the United States if we don't do something to change it," he told the Defense Writers Group on...

Shipping costs are surging around the globe, causing the price of sending a container from Asia to the West Coast to increase many times over. When Donald Trump was president in 2020, the price to ship a container from Asia to California was $3,800. That price spiked to $17,000 in October of 2021, according to supply chain technology company Freightos.

I'm looking for a simple explanation of what is causing this backlog of container ships off the California coast. I've been seeing a wide ranges of reasons including: A) environmental California trucking regulations from the California Air Resources Board which mandates all trucks must be 2011 or newer. B) CA law AB-5 which bans bans owner operators which was aimed at Uber and Lyft drivers but encompassed and banned almost all freelance jobs. C) Biden/Newsom vaccine mandates. Is it a combination of all of this and or some other factors? Democrats talk about a lack of truck drivers but why...

Will prolonged disruptions shift the pattern of trade? Agiant ship wedged across the Suez canal, record-breaking shipping rates, armadas of vessels waiting outside ports, covid-induced shutdowns: container shipping has rarely been as dramatic as it has in 2021. The average cost of shipping a standard large container (a 40-foot-equivalent unit, or feu) has surpassed $10,000, some four times higher than a year ago (see chart). The spot price for sending such a box from Shanghai to New York, which in 2019 would have been around $2,500, is now nearer $15,000. Securing a late booking on the busiest route, from China...

A record number of container ships are stuck waiting to enter California’s two largest ports as labor shortages and COVID-19 disruptions continue to roil a supply chain that’s being pushed to its limits ahead of the busy holiday shopping season. A total of 46 freight ships are at anchor or in a drift area waiting to enter the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the Marine Exchange of Southern California, which operates the Vessel Traffic Service for those two ports, reported late Monday evening. “Trend at anchor and in drift areas is essentially steady next 3 days,” the group...

With the latest weekly update of container shipping rates showing that prices – already at all time high – simply refuse to back down, as rates from China to the US surpassing a record $20,000, a new threat looms which could send already sky high prices into orbit. As the delta variant spreads on the mainland, most Chinese ports are now requiring a Covid test for all crew, with vessels forced to remain at anchor until negative results are confirmed, and requiring ships to quarantine for 14-28 days if they previously berthed in India or changed crew within 14 days...

Six men were arrested after Dutch police discovered sea containers that had been converted into a makeshift prison and sound-proofed “torture chamber” complete with a dentist’s chair, tools, including pliers and scalpels, and handcuffs, a high-ranking officer announced Tuesday. Authorities said police conducted the raid before the torture chamber could be used and alerted potential victims, who went into hiding. The grisly discovery was made last month by officers investigating leads generated by data from encrypted phones used by criminals. The communications network was cracked recently by French police. Detectives in Britain and the Netherlands have already arrested hundreds of...

PHILADELPHIA — U.S. authorities seized more than $1 billion worth of cocaine Tuesday from a ship at a Philadelphia port, calling it one of the largest drug busts in American history. The U.S. attorney’s office in Philadelphia announced the massive bust on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon, saying law enforcement agents seized about 33,000 pounds of cocaine from a large ship at the Packer Marine Terminal. Members of the crew were arrested and face federal charges.

Hal Kempfer, a noted international security expert, is getting a roomful of California public health officials and emergency responders to think about the unthinkable – a nuclear bomb exploding at the port of Long Beach, about four miles away...News out of North Korea has created a mini-bonanza for local manufacturers of nuclear fallout shelters. But more important to the vast bulk of the population, Kempfer says, is having some rudimentary knowledge of what it means to “shelter in place"...Sandy Wedgeworth, the public health emergency management coordinator, said she and her staff felt energized, not depressed, by what they learned from...

General Dynamics-NASSCO has launched Isla Bella, the first liquid natural gas-powered container ship that the Barrio Logan shipyard has built for the company TOTE. The 764-foot-long vessel slid down the launch ways Saturday at NASSCO, the last major shipyard on the West Coast. The company also is building a second vessel for TOTE under a contract that was signed in 2012. NASSCO said in a statement that the Marlin-class container ships “will be the largest dry-cargo ships of any kind in the world powered by LNG. The vessels ... will significantly decrease emissions while increasing fuel efficiency as compared to...

The world's largest capacity container ship has set off on its maiden voyage. Measuring 400 m (1,312 ft) in length and 58.6 m (192 ft) wide – or the size of four soccer fields for those more familiar with that alternative unit of measurement – the CSCL Globe can carry 19,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) shipping containers.

A Russian container ship carrying hundreds of tons of fuel was drifting without power in rough seas off British Columbia's northern coast Friday, a scenario a nearby First Nation community described as its "worst fear." The Canadian Forces' joint rescue coordination center in Victoria said the Russian carrier Simushir lost power late Thursday night off Haida Gwaii, also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, as it was making its way from Washington state to Russia. Canadian Navy Lt. Paul Penderghast said the ship was drifting nine nautical miles from shore, though he said it was largely maintaining that position. "It...

Container's material properties affect the viscosity of water at the nanoscale Sep 19, 2013 Enlarge Georgia Tech associate professor Elisa Riedo poses with a glass water bottle and a plastic water bottle. While container materials don't significantly affect the rate at which water pours from bottles of this size, a new study shows that the properties of containers at the nanoscale dramatically affect the viscosity of water. Credit: Rob Felt Water pours into a cup at about the same rate regardless of whether the water bottle is made of glass or plastic. But at nanometer-size scales for water and potentially...

The first U.S. multi-family condo built of used shipping containers is slated to break ground in Detroit early next year. Strong, durable and portable, shipping containers stack easily and link together like Legos. About 25 million of these 20-by-40 feet multicolored boxes move through U.S. container ports a year, hauling children’s toys, flat-screen TVs, computers, car parts, sneakers and sweaters. But so much travel takes its toll, and eventually the containers wear out and are retired. That’s when architects and designers, especially those with a “green” bent, step in to turn these cast-off boxes into student housing in Amsterdam, artists’...