A local look at container shipping in the pandemic

Today we take a look at how the world imbalance in container shipping is affecting Pacific Northwest ports. Some ports have lots of empty containers while others don’t have enough to hold the cargo they need to ship.

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Shipping chaos

The pandemic has thrown international container shipping into a dilemma.

Changing consumer needs during the past year have thrown traditional product supply and demand patterns out the window. The result is that some ports have scads of empty containers sitting around, while other ports have cargo waiting to be shipped and no containers at hand.

Such a seeminly simple problem is turning out to have global consequences. The result has been shipping chaos.

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Miraculous rescue as overboard seaman clings to sea trash

An amazing rescue after 16 hours lost at sea: a ship’s engineer fell overboard in the middle of the night. He survived until his shipmates retraced their path and found him – by clinging to a piece of ocean trash floating in the sea.

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Distant earthquakes and tsunamis

What should we be considering, as coastal dwellers, when we hear about a distant earthquake across the Pacific somewhere? Today we talk about the dread we all feel when he hear about an earthquake, and what you need to consider (and don’t need to worry about) with a distant quake many miles away.

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What’s next for the cruise ship industry?

As we come around to what would normally be cruise ship season, what’s next for cruise ships in the pandemic?

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Iceberg ho! A really big iceberg breaks away from Antarctica

Last week a gigantic iceberg broke off an ice shelf in Antarctica. Really big, like 20 times the size of Manhattan Island, or about half the size of Clatsop County. It’s now floating in the Southern Ocean.

[Photo credit: Brunt Ice Shelf, Antarctica, photo courtesy Pierre Markuse from Hamm, Germany via Wikimedia Commons]

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CCC Maritime Culture class on the schedule this Spring

Looks like a cool class this spring at Clatsop Community College in Astoria. It’s called “Exploring Maritime Culture.” The class is virtual so you can learn safely at home.

Professor Julie Williams Brown will be your guide. Here’s what she says about the class on her Facebook page:

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New wind turbine installation ships are a new breed of vessel

A new type of massive vessel is being built to meet the challenges of installing new, larger than ever wind turbine arrays in U.S. coastal waters. Today we’ll talk about these ships, which can carry giant cargoes of specialized equipment and can transform themselves into a stable platform for installation purposes, by sending huge legs down to the ocean floor.

Photo credit: German special crane ship for the setups of offshore wind farms called Wind Lift I in the harbour of Emden. Ships like this will be built in the US soon to allow installation of new, larger wind turbine assemblies. Wikimedia Commons Images. 

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Alaska’s Trident Seafoods open again after COVID outbreak

Today we take a look at the reopening of Trident Seafoods fish processing plants in Akutan, Alaska. The reopening after a large COVID outbreak at their facilities means fishermen around the region can go back to work after sitting idle at the docks for a month.

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