M/V Zim Kingston. On October 21, 2021, during rough weather, the container ship M/V Zim Kingston lost overboard 109 shipping containers around the entrance of Juan de Fuca Strait. It was a 260-metre, Greek-owned container ship travelling from South Korea to Vancouver.
The seas off the coast of Vancouver Island were heaving and the waves were five to six metres high as the wind ripped along at 35 knots. The sheltered waters of Juan de Fuca Strait, just 80 kilometres away, were worlds calmer, and safer. It could have come inside the strait as it awaited its scheduled unloading at the port in Vancouver.
Zim Kingston’s captain acted as though there was trouble on board. He contacted the Canadian Coast Guard saying it was nearing the mouth of the strait, ready to come in. Then he veered north and kept skulking along outside the strait for 20 hours. Some shipping experts are zeroing in on the hazardous chemical, potassium amyl xanthate, used in mining, which ignites when it contacts wet air. It makes sense to stay at sea if a substance that hot is at play on a storm-wracked ship. The last thing you want is an explosion in the harbour.
Rather than continuing to those sheltered waters, it zig-zagged in the windswept open ocean. The deck had keeled at a 35-degree angle. Capable of carrying 4,253 of the 20-foot containers (about six metres), the boat tilted perilously, and 109 of these metal boxes slipped into the ocean.
It eventually made it into the strait to more protected waters at Constance Bank, approximately 7 kilometres south of Victoria.
A GPS data buoy was deployed near the floating containers to mark their position as they drifted northwest off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Due to high winds and seas, no recovery was attempted then and for the next 10 days.
On October 23, 2021, 10 damaged containers on the deck caught fire. There were 52 tonnes of xanthate on board. As the Zim Kingston finally limped inside the strait to anchor off Victoria, its load was jostled and the storm was still raging. The xanthate burst into flames. The blaze could not be snuffed out with water. It was completely suppressed by Oct 27.
Four containers washed ashore near Cape Scott. Other than these initial four, no other containers have been found. They are not water-tight and would have been in heavy seas.
Contents include Christmas decorations, sofas, poker tables, metal car parts, clothing, toys, (including inflatable pink plastic unicorns), yoga mats, stand-up paddle boards, and industrial parts. Soon, during high tides, the foam on water lapping Cape Scott Provincial Park was viscous, “like Jello,” it was so thick with shampoo and baby lotion.
Only two containers with hazardous chemicals went overboard. The two chemicals of concern on the M/V Zim Kingston were potassium amyl xanthate and thiourea dioxide. Both have a very low risk of poisoning or toxicity.
By October 31, 71 refrigerators, 81 bags of Styrofoam, 19 bags of garbage, and 11 helicopter bags of garbage were flown off Cape Palmerston beach just south of San Josef Bay. Guise Bay was another cleanup priority. The four containers once empty were cut up and airlifted from each site.
There are 105 more shipping containers at large, two of them containing the volatile xanthate, and as the seas pound at their walls and rust their latches, it’s likely that each one will disgorge its contents. With every tide and every storm, more debris comes in.
Debris from the Zim Kingston continues to wash in including disposable gray urinal mats, kids’ bike helmets, pink plastic unicorns, and salted prawn tips (being eaten by wolves).
Also seen is unusual hockey equipment made out of special stuff to make it lighter from the Hansa Carrier, a ship that lost 21 containers off the coast of B.C. in 1990. This is a reminder of how long the debris dumped by the Zim Kingston will be with us.
M/V Zim Kingston is owned by Greece-based Danaos Shipping Company Ltd. Danaos hired Resolve Marine Group to carry out local salvage operations and fire suppression. The responsible person or spiller is legally required to clean up or manage the clean-up of a spill.
ONE Apus was a container ship that in 2020 lost approximately 1,816 containers overboard in the Pacific Ocean, the largest loss of containers in transport since 2013. 64 had dangerous goods. Debris from this spill appears on Vancouver Island beaches.
Built in 2019 and measuring 364 meters long, it was operated by Japan’s Ocean Network Express, sailing under the Japanese flag.
Sailing from Yantian, Shenzhen, to Long Beach, California, it encountered severe weather approximately 1,600 nautical miles (3,000 km) northwest of Hawaii. Heavy rolling seas were caused by Beaufort force 4 winds, north-westerly seas of 5 to 6 meters, a “long high swell” and wave heights of up to 16 meters. The ship arrived at Kobe, Japan, on 8 December, where it offloaded nearly 1000 damaged containers, and resumed its voyage on 16 March 2021.
The cause of the accident probably involved a combination of factors, including the weather conditions, the ship’s rolling behaviour, and the inherent hazards of eight-high on-deck container stowage. One contributor to the accident could be parametric roll resonance, a hazard known to affect container ships.
The cargo loss cost is estimated at $90 million. The ship was delayed for approximately three months.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone was stuck at home and ordering doodads off Amazon. As a result, container ships were busier than ever. The industry made US$25 billion in profits in 2020, but over US$150 billion in 2022. Retailers like Wal-Mart were chartering their own ships to keep up with demand. Ships’ dock appointments are ever-changing and many container vessels were anchored outside ports waiting days to unload.
Questions exist about how well the containers, often called “sea cans,” are lashed down. Was the declared weight for those containers right, or was the load off balance? Were labels describing the containers’ content accurate or fraudulent?”
Container ships transport about 90 percent of all consumer products worldwide. Between 2008 and 2019, an average of 1,382 containers were lost at sea each year. In 2022, more than 3,000 were lost.
The planet’s largest insurer of ships — Gard, of Norway — estimates that in 2020, there was one fire involving containerized cargo every two weeks. The blazes happen partly because, as they carry our lawnmowers, toothbrushes, dog toys and spatulas, container ships also transport a wide array of hazardous chemicals. “Dangerous goods” account for about 11 percent of all boxes shipped in containerized cargo and many are flammable. Calcium hypochlorite, used for bleaching paper and disinfecting swimming pools, has caused severe deck fires. In 2019, 13 containers of that substance exploded aboard the ship KMTC Hong Kong as it sat in a port in Thailand. Noxious smoke and acidic ashes rained on nearby villages. Over 130 people went to the hospital, gasping for breath as their skin tingled and burned.
“Nurdles” are lentil-sized plastic pellets that, in molten form, can be shaped into consumer products, and are almost constantly trickling into the ocean. In 2016, a British consulting firm, Eunomia, estimated that over 200,000 tonnes of nurdles pollute the marine environment each year.
Fish eat nurdles, which look like their food, and humans, in turn, eat the contaminated fish. Nurdles, meanwhile, are both rafts for E. coli and cholera and sponges for toxins such as PCBs. After the X-Press Pearl spill, on some Sri Lankan beaches, the nurdles were two metres deep.
Still, Sri Lanka was in a way lucky. The X-Press Pearl is, relative to most cargo ships, tiny. It can carry just 2,756 containers. Along with the Zim Kingston, which was not known to be carrying nurdles, it’s a bit player in an industry that has been steadily supersizing its vessels for over a half-century. In 1968, when the twenty-foot container first became an industry standard, the world’s largest ship could carry 1,530 of them. Today, 12 ships can accommodate 24,000 containers, and Canada has eagerly joined the jumboization party.
In 2020, the Port of Halifax completed a $38 million expansion project that, last May enabled it to welcome the biggest ship ever to enter Canada, the Marco Polo — nearly three Canadian football fields long and capable of hauling 16,022 containers.
In storms, container ships often lapse into rolling where the ship pitches, or moves up and down like a teeter-totter, in powerful waves, causing stacked sea cans to catapult into the ocean.
On the largest vessels, sea cans are piled some 40 metres above the waterline, when the ship starts to move with the motions of the sea, “you do not have to be a physicist to understand that the container stacks will be subject to great forces.”
The spills now plaguing our oceans are due in part to climate change, which is making storms ever more volatile. The industry is largely unregulated with the leverage to keep it that way.
Shipping’s governing body is a United Nations agency that the New York Times last year described as “clubby” and “secretive.” The International Maritime Organization includes 175 member states and grants a single vote to each state. It is the only UN agency where corporate players represent countries – one in four comes from the shipping industry. Last September a climate-focused publication, DeSmog, revealed that, throughout the 2010s, the Cook Islands’ ambassador to the International Maritime Organization, Ian Finley, was paid $700,000 by a lobby group that advocates for chemical tankers — the International Parcel Tankers Association. As his cheques rolled in, Finley vociferously fought greenhouse gas emission targets for shippers. It forbids journalists from quoting delegates at meetings without their permission. Megan Darby, of the website Climate Home News, was suspended from meetings after she used Finley’s “left field” quote in a story.
But in the view of many observers, the maritime organization’s climate policy remains retrograde. The shipping industry, which is not bound by the Paris Climate Accords, is still partly powered by “heavy fuel oil,” cheap, viscous stuff that’s essentially the dregs of the refining process and as thick as peanut butter when it’s cold.
The Ever Ace is the largest container ship in the world, capable of carrying nearly 24,000 shipping containers. Its slightly smaller sister ship, the Ever Given, became famous after getting stuck and blocking the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021.
The shipping industry causes three percent of all global emissions — more than all the airlines worldwide. While most ships are owned by wealthy nations — European countries, the U.S., South Korea and Japan, 96 percent of EU-owned ships were registered in less affluent countries.
While the Zim Kingston bears the flag of Malta, Comoros and Palau are currently the most popular flags of convenience. Both these tiny island nations “barely enforce environmental regulations and requirements for labour conditions for seafarers.”
Gord Johns, the NDP MP for Courtenay—Alberni on Vancouver Island. In 2018, a national strategy to combat plastic pollution in and around aquatic environments passed unanimously. In the wake of the Zim Kingston spill, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, which oversees the Coast Guard, failed to honour the resolve expressed in that unanimous vote.
Danaos, the ship’s owner dismantled the four beached shipping containers, and roughly 30 workers spent a month clearing 47 tonnes of debris from beaches.
But the cleanup did not begin until a week after the spill and the department didn’t let local environmental groups take part. Danaos is largely off the hook for the 105 sea cans still missing.
Johns is urging Fisheries and Oceans to establish an emergency coastal debris spill response plan. He also wants the department to hold shipping companies financially liable for all cleanup costs, even if spilled debris keeps washing up for years. Typically, shippers are, like Danaos, held accountable only for the first gush of litter. Shipping firms should pay port fees earmarked for an ongoing cleanup fund.
Furnish a manifest of all missing cargo. Containers on ships are frequently mislabelled. Dangerous-goods containers are mislabelled purposedly.
It’s tragic how humans have become dependent on all this stuff we don’t even need.”
