Category: Sea Stories

That grounded big container ship

So, just about a year after the Ever Given went aground in the Suez Canal, blocking traffic for days and creating chaos in the supply chain, a sister ship, the Ever Forward, somehow missed a small turn in the channel in the Chesapeake Bay while departing Baltimore and grounded in mud.

These ships are huge. They are 1300 feet long, nearly 200 feet wide, weigh 140,000 tons, and draw at least 40 feet of water when even partially loaded. They are the largest container ships built. Why one of these monsters was going to Baltimore is a question in itself. Baltimore is way up the Bay, far from the ocean, a relatively small East Coast container port. I was posted on a Military Sealift Command ship in Baltimore in 2015 and could see the container cranes from the ship, so I know where the Forward must have berthed. I imagine, if this was the first visit to the Port, there was some kind of event hosted by the Port, a celebration, executives with smiles and flowers and the press, “Oh, look, we can handle these ships, aren’t we the best?”

Based on videos and reports it seems the ship was traveling between 8 and 9 knots coming down the channel, coming south. The channel swings to the right, to starboard, maybe 15 degrees, but the Ever Forward just kept going straight. In the channel the water depth is 50 feet, but outside the channel the depth is 30 feet rising to 24 feet to less than 20 feet. The ship is now well off the channel, in the mud, fully, bow to stern. The depth at the bow is only 17 feet. This means that the hull of the ship, which is at least 40 feet from the keel to the water surface, somehow plowed into the sediment for all 1300 feet. Now the ship sits in the mud, with, quite likely, half that 40-foot draft not in water but in the mud beneath the water.

This is, actually, hard to imagine happening, unless that sediment was very soupy indeed. If the ship drove into the mud, pushing it aside as it drove forward, the mud would have to be pushed aside as well, meaning, forming a hump next to the hull. A rough calculation suggests this 140,000 ton ship might have pushed aside over 100,000 cubic yards of mud.

When the ship was coming south, the ship had to be under the command and control of a Chesapeake Bay Pilot. When I was sailing we always -always – took aboard a pilot when entering a port, any port. The pilot gives the commands, engine speed, wheel commands. One would think the pilot gave a command to turn the ship as the channel turned, but only the voice recorder will tell the real story. It is however likely the pilot, whoever he or she was, had rarely if ever been operating a ship that size, that slow to heed rudder commands.

Anyway, the ship went hard aground and now sits in the mud. Two dredges are working to remove the sediment from around the ship, the largest using a clam bucket that can hold 65 cubic yards at a time. Rough math, again – if it takes 15 minutes to drop the bucket, close it, bring it up, swing it over a barge, drop the load, and return to the bottom, and if the bucket never stops operating, day and night, to remove 100,000 cubic yards will require 16 days of dredging. But of course the barge and bucket have to be moved and repositioned as the dredging happens, so maybe you need to double that time, or triple it.

Apparently, also, the ship on leaving Baltimore was not holding a lot of ballast water, which is usually taken on when well offshore, so during the run down the Bay the ship is configured to reduce draft in the channel, meaning, with the weight of containers on the deck the ship might be considered tender – that is, a little top heavy. The reports are explaining that as they dredge by the ship they need to be careful they don’t cause a shelf near the ship which might allow it to roll into the deepened water – ie, take on a great list, or even capsize.

These ships are as I said earlier huge, and the containers stacked on the deck (as well as in the hull itself) reach very very high. Maybe it makes sense to remove fuel from the ship to lighten it, though this will also increase her tenderness. Another thing to do is remove containers, reduce the high weight. But the trouble here is that there aren’t many cranes mounted on barges that are tall enough to lift off those containers, and they would need to be lifted one at a time, a tedious and slow process. In the worst case, it might take weeks and weeks to remove containers and complete the dredging before the ship can be pulled back into the channel.

Of course, if the ship plowed through sediment this suggests that the bottom of the ship might be damaged, compressed, crumpled, bent. There is no question the sailors on the ship are sounding the voids and tanks every hour to make sure there are no leaks. Maybe there are leaks. Nobody had as of March 23 placed a boom around the ship, but surely this will happen soon, for there is the danger of fuel leakage as well.

This is going to be very expensive. The daily cost for dredging barges, dredges, and tugs is in the tens of thousands of dollars a day. It will be a race between trying to get the ship free as soon as possible so it can continue on its rotation, and dredging and moving enough sediment so the ship can be moved safely, without tearing open the hull or unbalancing the ship such that it shifts, maybe even rolls. And as they do this work, of course, as they pull the ship toward the channel, they come closer to the other marine traffic now using the channel. At some point the channel will need to be closed to free the Ever Forward. The worst outcome of all would be partly freeing the ship but not totally, yet blocking the channel.

This incident is not stopping a major world trade route. There will be no supply chain interruptions, except for those customers whose containers and goods are now delayed on that ship. But this is another sign of what can happen when an enormous, highly complex, clumsy ship makes one small mistake.

We will see more such mistakes.

A sea story about Watergate and January 6th – Updated

This weekend I’m thinking about Watergate, the scandal that began when some operatives burgled a Democratic office and got caught. That happened in the run-up to the 1972 election, which Nixon won hugely, in June I believe. I was fishing then, off New England, chasing offshore lobster in Lydonia Canyon out on the edge of the shelf, maybe 120 miles from Nantucket. My skipper, Sten, who passed away in 2000, was an avid reader of Doonesbury. He had a close friend, David Martin, also long gone, who had worked on Elliot Richardson’s staff back when Richardson was instrumental in establishing the Cape Cod National Seashore. Sten followed politics, sort of, which we learned in the coming two years as you will see.

I have a very vague and dim memory of reading about the break-in. The “Plumbers,” I think they were called.

We had a very tough summer, that summer, because we had switched from long lining for cod and haddock to the lobster fishery and we were making every mistake you could make, plus fighting for bottom with other lobster boats in the deep canyons off Massachusetts. However, by the fall we started to make some money, land some big trips. We had 600 traps, in 50 trap strings, out there and we would fish those traps for a week or ten days before coming in. We had a flooded lobster hold with refrigeration. In the late fall, November, we chased the lobsters up into shoal water, 30-50 fathoms, on the slope of Georges Bank, and on December 7th a Russian fleet of four boats came upon us and our gear and nearly wiped us out, towing through the traps such that we lost 500 of the 600 traps despite our best efforts to wave them away. A little 65 foot wooden longliner against 300-foot  Russian stern trawlers is no match at all.

That winter, 1972-1973, I was living in a drafty cottage in Dennis, Mass, with the remaining 100 traps stacked alongside the driveway, and while Sten chased funding for more traps I spent the winter with piles of five-eighths inch polypropylene line splicing and rigging the 50-trap “trawls” in the living room. This was a lot of splicing – splicing sections of groundline together with long splices, splicing into the line loops for the brummel hooks to attach the trawl to, splicing in the brummel hooks, and splicing the collars and loop[s and hooks for the 500 new 48 inch long lobster traps, made of plastic coated stiff wire. I’d sit in the living room with gear all over, a sharp knife, bent over, splicing.  It was a long winter, cold. This was the start of the Energy Crisis, embargoes, lines at gas stations, and pundits spoke of a coming ice age.

I watched a lot of TV, the one station I could see, a black and white flickering screen, long before cable TV let alone the web, and consequently I ended up watching all the televised Watergate hearings that winter, Sam Ervin, Butterfield, John Dean, Howard Baker, endless hours of testimony about the break in. I was watching when Butterfield (I think it was Butterfield) announced that all the meetings in the Oval Office were taped. It was a sensation, pandemonium.

That spring we went back out there with the new gear and tried to recoup our losses. The Watergate thing moved along, with stories about tapes and fights for tapes, and John Dean was accused of being a traitor to the Republican cause, and all the Republicans, to a man (they were nearly all men then) howled that the entire Watergate thing was a political witch hunt. Still, a special prosecutor was appointed in the early summer of 1973, Archibald Cox, and thus began a bitter fight over tapes and their release.

Meanwhile we fished, hard, barely hanging on. Lydionia Canyon became too crowded and we heard there were a lot of lobsters being caught up on Brown’s Bank, Canadian waters off Nova Scotia, at the same time as Sten arranged with his Nova Scotian friends (half our crew were boys from Clark’s Harbor, Nova Scotia) to rig out a longliner to harpoon swordfish, which we would take aboard at sea and bring back to the US for sale, splitting the money. Swordfish was illegal then due to a mercury scare. We ended up loading all our gear on the boat, three total round trips, and moved it to the southwest tail of Brown’s Bank. The tides were awful up there and we hid in the fog and sank the buoy lines, grappling them up to haul gear using the Loran A to find it.

Big mistake, all the way around. In the end we moved the gear back to a little unnamed canyon east of Lydonia and did OK, and through the fall made a year of it.

Labor Day weekend that summer, 1973, we were between trips to our gear (which was a 16 hour steam from the boat’s base in Hyannis, Mass) and Sten asked me and Gary, another member of the crew, if we’d help him because he had agreed that weekend to take his boat to Chatham to pick up some people and then go out to Monomoy Island to the outer beach – his friend, David Martin, the wife and grown kids of Francis Sargent, former governor of Massachusetts, and Elliot Richardson and his wife. Richardson, from Massachusetts, was the Attorney General of the United States at this time, and Gary and I knew he had been under intense pressure all summer concerning Archibald Cox, Watergate, and what to do.

We picked everyone up at Stage Harbor, Chatham – I brought the boat with Gary up from Hyannis and we met Sten there –  and motored about fifteen miles out to the end of Monomoy Island, where we anchored just offshore and rowed everyone in to the beach. It was more than a little intimidating to be right next to the Attorney General, and a former governor’s family, especially because Gary and I looked like long haired hippies, especially after the summer we’d had, and when we got to the beach everyone ate from the picnic basket and then Gary and I took off over the dunes because we both felt out of place and awkward. Elliot Richardson had brought fishing gear and he was setting up to surf cast. He’d be standing at the most eastern end of the Cape Cod mainland, miles from any houses or people, facing the Atlantic, Washington and the political fever far to the south.

Gary and I, over the dune and across the point that ended the island, hung around and then, because it was a hot sunny day and what the hell, went swimming, bare ass naked. The water was nice, even warm, and we were in the water a while. When we came out, though, a current had carried us one way and Elliot had come the other way, casting, and when we emerged there we were, streaming water and without clothes, ten feet from the Attorney General. Elliot was totally unfazed by us, polite. In fact I think he was delighted to be in such a contrast to the fevers back in DC.

“How was the swimming?” he asked us.
“Nice. How was the fishing? Catch anything?”
“That isn’t the point.” He smiled at us. We smiled back.

That fall the Watergate events heated up. Sten would, while hauling gear way offshore, tune in an AM radio so he could hear the headlines. He ran the boat out on deck on the starboard side and he could hear the radio through an open pilothouse window. I was working aft of him, emptying traps as they came from the water. Sten would yell aft to the rest of us when things happened.

“Nixon’s trying to fire Cox!”
“Richardson resigned! Ruckelshous resigned!”
“They’re calling it the Saturday night massacre!”

The following spring and summer, now two years since that 1972 break in, evidence mounted as some tapes were released, yet still the Republicans stood as a bloc against anything changing, stood as a bloc claiming this must be a witch hunt. However, once Alexander Butterfield said there were tapes, the witch hunt argument weakened.

That summer Nixon resigned, and he resigned because, eventually, the Republican Senators came to see the battle must be lost, the evidence was too overwhelming, and once the Senators turned, it was over, and Nixon was gone.

I am thinking of Watergate these days because, while the Watergate scandal was very different than the issues surrounding the January 6th attack on the Capitol, there has been one great similarity – months and months of solid Republican unity, unity in favor of their President or former President.

But, when Butterfield made the announcement there are tapes, early on, I sensed then that the character of the situation had changed materially, so now with the release of phone records and text messages, speculation must now shift to awareness and reality. It is hard to claim a political witch hunt in the face of evidence, visible to all.

It feels, right now, very much the way it felt at the end of July, 1974, when evidence became a torrent and it was abundantly clear laws had been broken. I have said to myself throughout this latest January 6th event that unless and until members of the former Presidents party accept evidence as true and significant, little can and will change. This has been especially the case even though Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have shown great courage to pursue the truth, but them alone.

It feels, this February 9th, based first on Mitch McConnell’s statements right after the papers were released to the Committee about seeing where the investigation leads, and then the other day coming out and forcefully stating the January 6th events were an effort to overturn the election, something might be shifting. Not much has shifted so far, but a few Republicans are coming forth to back McConnell, although at this point it seems clear they are doing this mostly to protect their own backsides than because those acts that day were sedition or treason

Back in the late summer of 1974 I had no idea, standing embarrassed and naked before the U.S. Attorney General, surely facing the decision of his lifetime, that I was standing before a true and real American hero. But I was. I am lucky for that. We all are. Now, nearly a half century later, every day, it seems, more evidence comes forth – the use of burn bags to destroy records, efforts to flush papers down the toilet, call logs and notes linking together a very broad conspiracy. What is still missing, though are any heroes, men or women who will stand before the flame and speak truth.

Where are they?

Fire at sea and complex systems…


Fall, 2021: So as I write this that ship is still burning north of here about 40 miles (I am in Port Angeles as I write this), with the situation uncertain as to what happens next; there are all these drifting containers about 40 miles west of the coast which represent a danger to other marine traffic;  and this enormous storm is bearing down on California. Just this afternoon the marine authorities near Los Angeles recommended in the strongest possible terms that the over 100 ships anchored or drifting just off the harbor entrance,  waiting for berth space, and positioned to hold their place in the queue to unload, put to sea immediately to gain sea room from each other and have room to battle the high waves and winds approaching them. If a huge storm with 20 to 30 foot swells strikes the land, all those ships anchored in shallow water, probably half a mile apart, but maybe much closer than that, will be at tremendous risk of dragging their anchors and running into each other. If you’re anchored and you wait for the storm to strike, believe me, hauling anchor in a 60 mile gale and 30 foot seas, and somehow getting up enough way to maneuver before you are cast against another ship, or the beach itself, is not a place anyone wants to be. I am guessing, right now, ships are scattering to the west, toward the storm, but toward sea room, too.


We build these complex systems which work wonderfully until they don’t, but when they don’t it is a disaster, and the necessary costs and preparation to respond to such a disaster can be enormous. For marine ships, it used to be, years ago, the U.S. Coast Guard had fire fighting ships, and the U.S.Navy had firefighting ships and tugs, but these days all that work is contracted out to private salvage companies, based a long distance from most events. Eventually they will gather the people and the material and the tugs or ships to respond, but in the long hours or days before then it is up to the ship’s crew and whatever small local city fire vessels there might be nearby. I would bet that the City of Seattle might have even sent one of their fire boats 60 miles north toward Victoria, for example.

We did fire drills all the time aboard commercial ships, and aboard military reserve ships too. Every time we did such a trial it was sobering. Here’s the thing. A ship fire suppression system is itself a complex series of pipes, pumps, valves and hoses, running all through the ship. In the engine room are the big pumps, which use fresh water stored in tanks or maybe salt water through hull sea cocks. These pumps need to be run every now and then, greased, maintained. All the valves to direct the water flow – and believe me there are hundreds on any ship, many in hard places to reach –  need to be “exercised” so they don’t freeze up, get stiff, or break. The hoses, canvas, heavy, up to four inches in diameter and extending hundreds of feet, with brass ends and fittings, lie coiled all over the ship, and they too need to be regularly rolled out, stretched, inspected, and charged with water to find weak spots. If you set up a fire hose system and run it fairly often it is a fantastic fire fighting system, but if you only try it now and then, it can be a disaster, a deluge of broken valves, frayed hoses, broken pumps. These systems run all over the ship, and the duty of the sailors and the engine room staff is to hold drills to get used to responding fast as well as to practice fire fighting, because when and if a real fire strikes you don’t want to be struggling to do your job, clumsy. This of course is not to mention the fire suits we have to don or the masks and tank air systems we use when going into an enclosed space or, worst of all, a fire in the engine room. Those tanks are supposed to hold air for 30 minutes of breathing, but when you’re in a 40 pound fire suit and helmet, crouched, in heat and smoke, heart hammering, the low air beep seems to start within five minutes.


So aboard a ship there is a fire fighting system (I haven’t even started with all the extinguishers) that is critically important but exercised seldom. Furthermore, as in many high-consequence situations (happening very rarely but when they do happen hugely consequential), when the best definition of success is nothing happens, over time all the drills and schedules become routine, often missed for good reasons, and bad reasons, such that what often seems to happen is when such a disaster strikes the system doesn’t work, or works badly, or the fire teams are not practiced.


All sailors need to conduct real fire training, with all the gear, and real fires, in terrifying closed spaces, again and again, to keep their certification. But all we sailors, whether deck workers or officers or engineers or the steward’s department, are not fire fighters by profession. Our task in the event of a big fire is to hold the fort as best we can until the big boys arrive.


We all know, all of us, that if such a fire happens far from any help, or a fire gets out of control, there is nothing we can do. Off course, if such a conflagration occurs well offshore, then one ship and her crew are lost, but if it happens in a harbor someplace, a naval base or a big container complex, then the disaster can be far greater. But it seems, these days, that at U.S. Navy bases there are no fire tugs or ships staffed by the Navy. There used to be, but over the last few decades this work has been outsourced to private contractors.
I worked on military reserve ships. It used to be that such ships were staffed and manned by Navy personnel, enlisted men and women and officers, but somewhere along the way the decision was made to remove these ships and their staffing from the Navy and contract it out. This meant work for U.S. trained commercial and merchant sailors, of which I was one when I did it, but the main lesson I received from the ships I worked on was that they cost an absolute fortune to maintain and keep operational, and now that fortune included a hefty profit for the private contractor, too.


All of which to say, just in the case of ships, they are complex, and expensive to maintain, and budget pressures always reduce those maintenance dollars, and then you have a complex asset that cannot justify the required maintenance and prevention budget, yet if a fire happens, is entirely ill equipped to properly fight that fire. Everyone who goes to sea knows this, of course, it is the secret gnawing anxiety always with you, and you simply hope for the best, pray your officers know what the hell to do if a fire breaks out, pray you know what to do.


So, vagabond drifting containers somewhere out there, right now. A ship burning just to the north, close to a harbor and a city, and questions arising about whether the necessary assets can be found to properly fight the fire. An enormous storm bearing down on southern California forcing over 100 ships to either flee into the teeth of the gale or try to ride it out where they are, all those ships forced to wait outside the harbor because of the myriad supply chain breakdowns throughout the system — lack of berth space, lack of empty containers, lack of chassis for the containers, lack of rail capacity, lack of spaces to store the containers, the entire worldwide flow of scheduled container services interrupted and changed, blockages expanding and then contracting, all resulting in huge uncertainties about deliveries — deliveries of all the goodies we’ve come to think is what Christmas is about and, even more important, deliveries of all the necessary parts and components needed to finish these complicated gadgets we’ve come to demand and depend on from a worldwide sourcing system that, when it falters, is a disaster.


Maybe this is a once in a decade confluence of factors bringing notice to the fragility of these complex sophisticated systems we have constructed and then cannot or choose not to maintain.


We better hope so.

Ocean trade….

This is kind of a sea story, I guess. In 1984 I’d been working out of Fall River, Mass on a red crab vessel, Taurus, ten day trips to the edge of the continental shelf ranging from Virginia to Maine, deep water, catching red crab at 600 fathoms on 100-trap lines, butchering the crab, icing them, for delivery to a processing plant up by Boston. Red crabs are hard to keep alive in tanks of water, unlike, say, lobsters, or, I am guessing, the Alaskan crab species. We’d fill mesh bags with crab parts, bodies or legs, bathe them in a sulfite mixture for disinfectant, then ice them in the hold. The Taurus was a converted small Navy ship, 180 feet long, a sister ship of the infamous Pueblo, but with the topsides ripped off and changed, a good sea boat, comfortable, and safe, or as safe as a 40 year old ship could be.

Then I had a chance to go to work in New York, and I took the job because it was a challenge, with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, to rebuild an abandoned steamship terminal in Brooklyn into some kind of fishing operation. In 1984 New York was the biggest port in North America, landing millions of containers at newer terminals over on the Jersey side, Newark, as well as a terminal on Staten Island and one in Brooklyn. Containers were king, and New York was the center of the action. Remember the movie, “On the Waterfront?” That was about marine labor in the middle nineteen fifties, when containers first appeared, and by the early sixties the 35,000 longshoremen in the city saw their job security disappearing before their eyes, as ships that previously took weeks to unload with gangs of dozens of people could now be unloaded – or the containers carrying all the freight unloaded – in a day or less using huge cranes and far fewer men. There was a huge labor battle over this, and when the dust cleared an agreement had been reached to allow containers to be unloaded by smaller gangs with the proviso that the rest of the displaced longshoremen were guaranteed an annual wage until they died. When I arrived there in 1984 I first heard about “GAI”, costing New York shippers something like $ 100,000,000 a year, which added to the cost of landed containers there, and which, therefore, encouraged other ports along the east coast to enter the business and offer cheaper rates.

By the 1980s manufacturing was already moving to Asia – Japan, mostly, or Korea – although China was starting to roar. By the time I came to New York some west coast ports, led by Seattle, interestingly enough, had started partnering with railroads to ship containers from Asia to the midwest and east coasts, offering faster shipping times than all-water from Asia to the U.S east coast through the Panama Canal, and this really took off when the railroads started placing the containers two-high on specially built cars, doubling the capacity of the trains. It took a few years to raise all the bridges and tunnels to enable the taller trains, but by 1984 much of that was done, enabling cargo shipped from Asia to reach the eastern US weeks earlier than all-water service. This rail innovation started the explosion of the west coast ports. This rail system grew and grew until, today, over 120 trains a week leave west coast ports to the inland United States.

In fact, just as I reached New York, the Port Authority, trying to compete with this new threat, had started their own double-stack service from New York to the interior, and they had sent their first train just the week I arrived there. I recall the excitement and then the bitter disappointment when that first train, made up of containers lashed two-high onto a flatcar, reached its destination with the container contents shaken and damaged, because the flatcar’s springs or whatever they are on rail cars were too rigid and the shaking transit ruined the cargo.

I was there in New York 1984-1990. During that time New York’s share of traffic dropped and dropped as a dozen other ports expanded and stole business; as the number of trains running cross country doubled and doubled again; as ships grew bigger and bigger. The dogma then was all ships had to be narrow enough to transit the Panama Canal, 105 fleet wide or less. There was even an around-the-world container service in operation. However, in 1988, American President Lines – APL -built some container ships that were too wide for the Panama Canal – post-Panamax ships, so-called – ships built expressly for the Asia-US West Coast or Asia -Europe trade. There was even talk, as by this time China was humming and factories seemed to be moving south toward Hong Kong and Viet Nam, of ships running from Singapore west through the Straits of Malacca, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic Ocean directly to New York and some other U.S east coast ports, ships big enough to carry 5,000 20 foot or 2500 40 foot containers for the trip to work economically. I even remember a meeting in 1987 on the 64th floor of World Trade Center Tower Number One with the Port marketing guys scoffing that such a cargo string or loop would ever happen; that post-Panamax container ships were absurd. Ridiculous, some said. Impossible. A fantasy.

We’ll return to that scoffing later, and those APL ships, the first container ships too wide for the Panama Canal and in 1988 the biggest in the world, over 900 feet long and 120 feet wide.

The fish project at that abandoned Brooklyn facility, Erie Basin, failed, and I ended up working for the Port Department Planning Group planning container expansion facilities, of which I knew at the time nothing. The race was on, every port chasing every other port, fighting to deepen channels, expand acreage, piers, container cranes, all to entice the ever-bigger ships to land and discharge cargo. The mantra was this global enterprise was becoming increasingly efficient and global, the ships bigger and bigger, containers becoming the preferred manner of all consumer goods cargo world-wide. Nobody, as I recall, spoke about all the American factories and jobs that were disappearing. Nobody. Those APL ships at 5,000 TEU, too big for the Panama Canal, were replaced by ships of 6,000 TEU, then 8,000, then 12,000, then 15,000, even 18,000, ships 140 feet wide and 1300 feet long, enormous. And, to handle these ships, harbors were dredged to 40 feet then 50 then 60 then 70. The yards behind the wharves expanded, became larger, and more and more specialized and automated equipment was designed to stack containers higher and higher. Computer systems were expanded to track each container, to keep track of everything going on.

I moved to Seattle in 1990 and for nearly 20 years continued working mainly in the waterfront cargo shipping sector, designing and building container terminals. All those years, until I left the port business in 2012, the drumbeat was for more, bigger, faster. A huge and enormously complex logistics system arose to handle all this cargo, and as the manufacturing of all these consumer items moved to Asia everything depended more and more on a seamless, nonstop supply chain, a mixture of factories, warehouses, truckers, railroads, ships, more warehouses, and server farms of huge size processing all the data, all in the interest of seamless, fast, delivery of goods and products to the American and European consumer, often with the main goal of making everything as cheap as possible. The worldwide volume of containers and the number of container ships exploded.

After I left the port authority sector in 2012, still needing to work, I dusted off my years of sea time as a commercial fisherman in the 1960s-1980s and joined the Sailors Union of the Pacific and went down to the hall, Ordinary Seaman, hoping my card would come up. It eventually did, and I flew to New York, Newark, eyes wide and terrified, to join my first ship, a ship that had for several years been engaged in just that run so scoffed at when I had worked in New York nearly 30 years before – New York to Charleston to Savannah to Norfolk to Damietta Egypt at the Suez Canal to Jebel Ali on the Persian Gulf to Singapore through the Straits of Malacca and return, a 60-70 day round trip, on the very same ship that had been at one time the first post Panamax container ship and the largest on earth, the flagship of its class, the President Truman, now a measly rusty beaten up 5,000 TEU ship at the end of its useful life, a ship with over 175,000 hours on its main engine.

I made a few trips on the Truman and then APL sold her to Indian breakers for scrap and the last trip was one-way, New York to Singapore, where we handed her over to the new owners and flew home. On the way in to Singapore, the summer of 2013, we passed a new Maersk ship of 15,000 TEU with a Discovery TV crew aboard. We passed close alongside, dwarfed in size, once the king of the hill, now a rusty small ship among dozens of others, hardly noticeable. It was a haunting moment, that moment, watching that huge ship ghost by, enormous, just huge. It felt like the passing of an era, and now I think it was.

So when Covid hit, the virus hit a world trade and manufacturing system entirely built upon the container, promising shipments cheap enough to offset manufacturing distance, and offering as well the chance to use the ship itself as a warehouse while the goods were in transit, helping in the dream we could build a just in time efficient system free of inventory and free of excessive costs for spares and backlog parts; build instead a system where everything moved efficiently and inexpensively. Modern computer systems and worldwide banking systems made the data flows seem easy, almost magical, and, again, the view held we had figured all this out, all was well.

But, and take this from someone who first sat in port authority meetings with shipping CEO executives promising all was possible and who then chose to chip rust on the ships carrying the cargo and saw how fragile and difficult it was to keep the flows going, and how vulnerable everything would be if a great shock halted the flow, the imagined efficiency of modern data systems and logistics equipment to deliver goods is only that – imagined.

That ship that ran into the bank in the Suez a few months ago was a harbinger of what is happening now, a sign, a clear warning. One ship blocks one waterway and the world seems to stop.

But now, months on, after Covid has decimated ship’s crews and truck drivers and essential workers, after this hugely complex system has revealed all its many and critical vulnerabilities, it is sinking in to everyone that we have a problem, a huge problem. The price for great efficiency seems to be enormous complexity. The promise of just in time flows and worldwide manufacturing is being seen as flawed, brittle, because of that complexity, yet it will take both time and strong leadership to move manufacturing back closer to the consumer, and eliminate some of the risky and brittle links now being exposed.

President Biden made an announcement the other day that Long Beach and Los Angeles will operate 24 hours a day to relieve congestion, get the Christmas goods to the consumer in time. Leaving aside the lesson about why a good Christmas consuming season should be a measure of national health, Biden’s call was surely political, an effort so he won’t wear whatever bad might happen this Christmas. That is hard for him to do as the President, but it is also useful to know that what he called for, a 24 hour a day operation, is meaningless.. When a ship is at berth it is unloaded around the clock, already a 24 hour a day operation. There are 73 ships more or less waiting to unload outside southern California. I don’t know how many berths are at Los Angeles and Long Beach but surely there are at least 20. Those 73 ships could be discharged in three or four days if there are longshoremen to do it, but that is not the problem, the problem is where do you put the containers once off the ship? Are there truck drivers to take them somewhere and where do they go? How many are supposed to go on trains and how many trains are there? What about all the downstream and upstream cargo flows that have also been stopped, or paused? All those containers shipped to the west coast need to somehow be sent back for loading again, meaning the ships will be carrying air, the voyage a total sunk cost.

All of which to say, this seems to be a system-wide problem, not a political problem, although the rage held by all those workers who saw their jobs sent overseas is real and arguably the most important political issue facing us today. The entire system of a container ship delivery belt enabling one part of the earth to build things and another part to consume things seems to be breaking down, perhaps entirely flawed, and whatever readjustment that must be made will surely be painful and slow.

That first post-Panamax ship I heard about in 1988 and then sailed on 25 years later, the President Truman? She is surely now broken up, melted into steel, and perhaps contained in a much newer ship, perhaps even within one or several of the ships now stranded outside San Pedro.

What I am wondering about, reading about these supply chain issues, and then reading more about how workers are being burnt out forced to work overtime and how it seems many many systems of delivery and handling are coming apart, is whether we have built something so wonderfully efficient and complex that we failed to see that, once broken, it cannot be put back together.

Most of us have heard about Humpty Dumpty, as kids. It feels today as if the entire global supply chain system – send jobs to where cheapest-minimize inventory-worship efficiency and low cost-thrive on a throw-away culture – is the modern manifestation of a nursery rhyme birthed at the dawn of the industrial age at the end of the eighteenth century:

Humpty Dumpty sat of a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again