On a website for a marine insurance company, there is a report about containers lost at sea. According to this article, there are between 5 and 6 million containers in transit at any given time. Based (I assume) on insurance claims, ship logs, and other data, it's estimated that about 2000 containers are lost overboard every year, perhaps less. This means that .005 percent of the containers shipped are lost overboard. The report goes on to discuss the probability of containers staying afloat. Calculating volumes and displacements shows that a 20 foot container would have to exceed 16 tons before it sank, while a 40 foot container would have to exceed 32 tons. This is normally in excess of what these containers weigh when loaded. So in theory, a container would take a very long time to sink. But the things to consider are that most containers are not watertight, and their construction is actually pretty flimsy. Containers are primarily designed to be weatherproof, not waterproof. So while in theory a 40 -foot container could stay afloat for up to 186 days given the rate water would leak into the container through the door seals and seams, the reality is that most containers sink pretty quickly. This, according to the insurance article, is because containers are not designed to hold up under boarding seas, the act of being ripped off the ship does even more damage to the containers, and once in the sea, they aren't designed to stand up to the pounding and twisting they will receive in the heavy weather that tore them off the ship in the first place. The article does say that the nature of the cargo in the container will contribute to the ability of the container to float. Light or airtight cargo can keep a container on or near the surface for quite awhile even if the container itself is damaged. In these cases, the container won't sink until the cargo has become waterlogged. But the bottom line of the report was that the chances of a vessel hitting a container at sea are actually very small. Of course, if you're one of the few people that hit one, the chances don't seem small at all. And think of all those plasma screen TVs and washing machines and boxes of shoes that are sitting on the ocean floor. Good fish habitats now, I guess.______________________________ C. Marin Faure 36' Grand Banks "La Perouse" Bellingham, Washington