Sunami debris

L

Larry Patrick

New member
News reported debris are starting to come ashore in washington state. They have predicted 70 million tons of refuse to hit US coastline from japan.Thats alot of stuff to watch out for while boating.
 
There is a android app for that. No really, you down load the app and when you find something you can take a picture with your phone and then record the location and time that you found it and it goes to a data base that tracks all of it. Saw it online somewhere last month.
 
It could make salmon fishing off the coast of Washington, Oregon a little more challenging dodging several million pounds of debries.
One will have be a lot more careful making long runs to the tuna grounds for the next few years.
 
The interesting thing from Tom's link to the NOAA site is that there appears to be no definitive source of the media information on the amount of debris. From the NOAA site:

"We were unable to find the source of the figures quoted in the media of five to 20 million tons of marine debris generated by the Japan tsunami. A figure of 25 million tons has been mentioned in the media, but that is an estimate of the total quantity of debris from the disaster (Ministry of the Environment, Government of Japan)."

Apparently the amount has grown by a factor of 3 in some media source. :roll:
 
A little perspective - the larger container ships carry of order 9000 TEU (TEU = twenty-foot-equivalent units - e.g. about one truck load). One TEU about 40,000 lbs if fully loaded = 20 tons. So one large cargo ship carries about 180,000 tons. 5 million tons of debris approximately equals the debris generated if 28 container ships dumped their load overboard.

It's estimated that 2000-10,000 containers are lost at sea each year in storms (about = to one ship's worth of cargo).
 
rogerbum":k1k9ki32 said:
A little perspective - the larger container ships carry of order 9000 TEU (TEU = twenty-foot-equivalent units - e.g. about one truck load). One TEU about 40,000 lbs if fully loaded = 20 tons. So one large cargo ship carries about 180,000 tons. 5 million tons of debris approximately equals the debris generated if 28 container ships dumped their load overboard.

It's estimated that 2000-10,000 containers are lost at sea each year in storms (about = to one ship's worth of cargo).
Click to expand...

Roger-

These numbers kinda overwhelm me!

If one container = 20 tons, and one large cargo ship carries 180,000 tons, it therefore carries 9000 containers (?) Wow! There must be a lot of 'em down in the holds! (Out of sight, of course!) We see the ships loading and unloading all the time, but the 9000 figure is mind-boggling for a container count!

Lost cargo containers are a serious hazard to small vessels like sailboats on the open ocean. Many probably sink, but others float, in varying degrees. The ocean voyagers nightmare is hitting one of these babies at night, partially submerged, and nearly as hard as a rock with its all-steel construction and the weight of all the cargo and water inside. They're kind of like a little harbingers from Davey Jones Locker just waiting to return some unlucky souls to the sea from which they came! Sleep tight, my sailor tonight! (And wear that PFD, EPRIB, Mustang Survival Suit, Ditch Bag, Life Raft, Satellite Phone, Shark Repellant, +……………………………….. !

Joe. :teeth :thup
 
that is just a rough number all container ships do not carry the same number of containers, they are built differently, length width etc. but more importantly than how much debris what are we going to have to do with it? How much is this going to cost us in the long run?
 
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