Unintended 3c

Higher retail customer demand, along with reduced efficiency in the transport side of the business, is putting a lot of pressure on those container shipping companies (here and here). Some suggest that safety standards have been stretched in the big effort to get merchandise where it needs to go.

The weight of a loaded container ship seems enormous when you try to get a sense of scale. The new, bigger ships are huge and look top-heavy and vulnerable to big ocean waves. The biggest loss of containers ever in one incident happened just last November.

During a storm in the Pacific, 1900 containers were lost over the side or damaged on the One Apus. That's more than the average number of containers lost in a whole year by all container ships. 

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Wave height combined with distance between the waves (~equal to the length of the ship) can produce  violent instability, a phenomenon known as parametric rolling. The accident investigation to come may identify that as the cause.

from Old Salt Blog