wrote in message
...
I posted some figures(I thought to this thread) a while ago and
according to the insurance companies, that insure containers, the loss
per year is from 2 - 10,000 containers per year. The port of
Singapore, for example, handled some 23.2 million containers in 2005.

If you apply loss of containers ONLY to Singapore shipping then some
0.043 % of the containers passing through Singapore are lost.

The next question would be to determine how many boats are sunk by
collisions with containers each year and off set this figure by how
many vessels are sunk by collisions with other kind of floating
debris.

My suspicion is that the sinking of boats by hitting containers is
infinitesimal.


Bruce in Bangkok
(brucepaigeATgmailDOTcom)

It would not at all surprise me to find that floating logs outnumber
floating shipping containers by at least an order of magnitude. And there is
no question that floating logs can do serious damage to vessels, large and
small. From time to time, a ship or a boat will strike a whale -- doing
serious damage to one or the other, sometimes both. And there may well be
other hazards out there as well. My comments regarding shipping containers
may not be focused on the entirety of floating hazards, but it's a start.