[bigwavedave]

> "Probably they lost empty containers." Why "probably"? The article mentions millions of dollars in cargo and that they haven't even finished doing a full inventory manifest check yet. Are empty containers more likely to be lost overboard? Genuine question, I know nothing about cargo ships.

[cagataygurturk]

To pull the centre of weight to the bottom, typically overboard space is used only for empty containers in cargo ships. Otherwise it is very very challenging to keep the vessel stable. Actually mostly impossible.

You might ask why they even carry empty containers, it is because not every loaded container goes back to its source location with other type of goods and cargo ships should always carry empty containers to solve one of the most challenging problems of the industry, which is called „empty container repositioning“. Cargo traffic across different locations of the world is not perfectly balanced. So, for example Chinese should get some empty containers back to load them back and send to Western world :)

Source: I am a Naval Architect by education and worked at cargo ship design and construction for a while.