Thousands of shipping containers have been lost at sea. What happens when they burst open?

LONG BEACH, Wash. (AP) — Russ Lewis has picked up some strange things along the coast of Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state over the years: Hot Wheels bicycle helmets with feather tufts, life-size plastic turkey decoys made for hunters, colorful squirt guns.

And Crocs — so many mismatched Crocs.

If you find a single Croc shoe, you might think somebody lost it out on the beach, he said. “But, if you find two, three, four and they’re different — you know, one’s a big one, one’s a little one — that’s a clue.”

These items aren’t like the used fishing gear and beer cans that Lewis also finds tossed overboard by fishers or partygoers. They’re the detritus of commercial shipping containers lost in the open ocean.

Most of the world’s raw materials and everyday goods that are moved over long distances — from T-shirts to televisions, cellphones to hospital beds — are packed in large metal boxes the size of tractor-trailers and stacked on ships. A trade group says some 250 million containers cross the oceans every year — but not everything arrives as planned.

More than 20,000 shipping containers have tumbled overboard in the last decade and a half. Their varied contents have washed onto shorelines, poisoned fisheries and animal habitats, and added to swirling ocean trash vortexes. Most containers eventually sink to the sea floor and are never retrieved.

Cargo ships can lose anywhere from a single container to hundreds at a time in rough seas. Experts disagree on how many are lost each year. The World Shipping Council, an industry group, reports that, on average, about 1,500 were lost annually over the 16 years they’ve tracked — though fewer in recent years. Others say the real number is much higher, as the shipping council data doesn’t include the entire industry and there are no penalties for failing to report losses publicly.

Much of the debris that washed up on Lewis’ beach matched items lost off the giant cargo ship ONE Apus in November 2020. When the ship hit heavy swells on a voyage from China to California, nearly 2,000 containers slid into the Pacific.

Court documents and industry reports show the vessel was carrying more than $100,000 worth of bicycle helmets and thousands of cartons of Crocs, as well as electronics and other more hazardous goods: batteries, ethanol and 54 containers of fireworks.

Researchers mapped the flow of debris to several Pacific coastlines thousands of miles apart, including Lewis’ beach and the remote Midway Atoll, a national wildlife refuge for millions of seabirds near the Hawaiian Islands that also received a flood of mismatched Crocs.

Scientists and environmental advocates say more should be done to track losses and prevent container spills.

“Just because it may seem 'out of sight, out of mind,’ doesn’t mean there aren’t vast environmental consequences,” said marine biologist Andrew DeVogelaere of California’s Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, who has spent more than 15 years studying the environmental impact of a single container that was found in sanctuary waters.

“We are leaving time capsules on the bottom of the sea of everything we buy and sell — sitting down there for maybe hundreds of years,” he said.

This year’s summer winds washed thousands of plastic pellets ashore near Colombo, Sri Lanka, three years after a massive fire aboard the X-Press Pearl burned for days and sank the vessel a few miles offshore.

The disaster dumped more than 1,400 damaged shipping containers into the sea — releasing billions of plastic manufacturing pellets known as nurdles as well as thousands of tons of nitric acid, lead, methanol and sodium hydroxide, all toxic to marine life.

Hemantha Withanage remembers how the beach near his home smelled of burnt chemicals. Volunteers soon collected thousands of dead fish, gills stuffed with chemical-laced plastic, and nearly 400 dead endangered sea turtles, more than 40 dolphins and six whales, their mouths jammed with plastic. “It was like a war zone,” he said.

Cleanup crews wearing full-body hazmat suits strode into the tide with hand sieves to try to collect the lentil-size plastic pellets.

The waterfront was closed to commercial fishing for three months, and the 12,000 families that depend on fishing for their income have only gotten a fraction of the $72 million that Withanage, founder of Sri Lanka’s nonprofit Centre for Environmental Justice, believes they are owed.

“Just last week, there was a huge wind, and all the beaches were full of plastic again,” he said in mid-June.

Lost container contents don’t have to be toxic to wreak havoc.

In February, the cargo ship President Eisenhower lost 24 containers off the central California coast. Some held bales of soon-waterlogged cotton and burst open. Debris washed ashore near Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, a federally protected area.

The ship’s captain informed the U.S. Coast Guard, which worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and California State Parks to remove the debris. Each bale was too heavy to drag away — instead they had to be cut up, each filling two dump trucks.

“A rancid soggy mess,” said Eric Hjelstrom, a chief ranger for California State Parks. “If tidal pools get filled with cotton, that can block out sunlight and harm a lot of organisms.”

One bale landed in an elephant seal nursery, surrounded by baby seals. “You have to be careful how to approach it – you don’t want to injure the seals,” Hjelstrom said. A marine mammal specialist gently escorted 10 pups away before the bale was removed.

Although the operators of the President Eisenhower helped pay for cleanup, neither California nor federal authorities have ordered the company to pay any penalties.

As for the metal shipping containers, only one was spotted on a U.S. Coast Guard overflight, and it had vanished from sight by the time a tugboat was sent to retrieve it, said Coast Guard Lt. Chris Payne in San Francisco.

When shipping containers are lost overboard, “Most of them sink. And a lot of times, they’re just in really deep water,” said Jason Rolfe of NOAA’s Marine Debris Program.

Most sunken containers — some still sealed, some damaged and open — are never found or recovered.

The Coast Guard has limited powers to compel shipowners to retrieve containers unless they threaten a marine sanctuary or contain oil or designated hazardous materials. “If it’s outside our jurisdiction,” said Payne, “there’s nothing that we can do as the federal government to basically require a company to retrieve a container.”

The long-term impact of adding on average more than a thousand containers each year to the world’s oceans — by the most conservative estimates — remains unknown.

Scientists at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California are studying the cascade of changes wrought by a single container found by chance on the seabed.

Their research team was operating a remote-control vehicle at 4,200 feet (1,280 meters) below the surface to study deep-sea corals in 2004 when they were surprised to encounter a metal box. “It’s just serendipity that we found it,” said marine ecologist Jim Barry. Despite multiple spills in nearby shipping lanes, “It’s the only container that we know exactly where it landed.”

“The first thing that happens is they land and crush everything underneath them,” said DeVogelaere, who studied the sunken container. By changing the flow of water and sediment, the container completely changes the micro-ecosystem around it — impacting seafloor species that scientists are still discovering.

“The animals in the deep have felt our presence before we even knew anything about them,” he said.

Labels showed the container came from the Med Taipei, which had lost two dozen boxes in rough seas on a journey between San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 2006, the ship owners and operators reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to pay $3.25 million for estimated damages to the marine environment.

More than 80% of international trade by volume arrives by sea. All this cargo travels on increasingly vast ships.

“On the modern big ships, it’s like a high-rise building,” said Jos Koning, a senior project manager at MARIN, a Netherlands-based maritime research organization that studies shipping risks.

Today’s largest cargo vessels are longer than three football fields, with cranes required to lift containers and stack them in towering columns. When the industry took off some 50 years ago, ships could hold only about a tenth of the freight that today’s behemoths carry. According to the insurer Allianz, container ship capacities have doubled in just the last two decades.

Greater size brings heightened risks. The largest ships are more difficult to maneuver and more prone to rolling in high waves. And there’s a greater chance that any single box could be damaged and crushed — a destabilizing accident that can send an entire stack of containers cascading into the sea.

In February, the marine insurer Gard published a study based on six years of their claims that showed 9% of ultra-large ships had experienced container losses, compared to just 1% of smaller vessels.

Accidents are often linked to cargo that has been inaccurately labeled, weighed or stored. Investigators determined that the X-Press Pearl’s devastating spill near Sri Lanka, for instance, was the result of a fire that likely started from a poorly stacked container that was leaking nitric acid.

But cargo ship operators don’t have the capacity to verify all container weights and contents, and instead must rely on information that shippers provide.

“It’s just completely impractical to think that you can open every container,” said Ian Lennard, president of the National Cargo Bureau, a nonprofit that works with the U.S. Coast Guard to inspect seagoing cargo.

In a pilot study, the group found that widespread mislabeling and improper stowage meant that nearly 70% of shipping containers arriving in the U.S. with dangerous goods failed the bureau’s safety inspection.

“Despite all these problems, most of the time it arrives safely,” Lennard said.

But when there is a crisis — a ship hits rough weather, or a container carrying a chemical ignites in summer heat — accidents can have catastrophic impacts.

How often do shipping container spills happen? There’s no clear answer.

Existing tracking efforts are fragmented and incomplete. Although a few shipwrecks and disasters grab headlines, like the March crash of a cargo ship into a Baltimore bridge, much less is known about how often containers are lost piecemeal or away from major ports.

To date, the most widely cited figures on lost shipping containers come from the World Shipping Council. The group’s membership, which carries about 90% of global container traffic, self-reports their losses in a survey each year.

Over 16 years of collected data through 2023, the group said an average of 1,480 containers were lost annually. Their recent figures show 650 containers were lost in 2022 and only about 200 last year.

Elisabeth Braw, senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative, said self-reported surveys miss the full picture.

For example, not included in the 2023 tally were 1,300 containers from the cargo ship Angel, which sank near Taiwan’s Kaohsiung port. That’s because the ship’s operators aren’t members of the World Shipping Council.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a maritime intelligence company that’s tracked thousands of marine accidents on container ships over the past decade, told AP that underreporting is rampant, saying ship operators and owners want to avoid insurance rate hikes and protect their reputations.

Marine insurers, which are typically on the hook to pay for mishaps, likely have access to more complete data on losses – but no laws require that data to be collected and shared publicly.

World Shipping Council president and CEO Joe Kramek said the industry is researching ways to reduce errors in loading and stacking containers, as well as in navigating ships through turbulent waters.

“We don’t like when it (a container loss) happens,” said Kramek. “But the maritime environment is one of the most challenging environments to operate in.”

Earlier this year, the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization adopted amendments to two global ocean treaties aimed at increasing transparency around lost shipping containers. Those changes, expected to take effect in 2026, will require ships to report losses to nearby coastal countries and to authorities where the vessel is registered.

But with no enforceable penalties, it remains to be seen how extensively operators will comply.

Alfredo Parroquín-Ohlson, head of cargo in the IMO’s maritime safety division, said, “We just encourage them and tell them how important it is, but we cannot be a police.”

It’s not just environmentalists who worry. Some lost containers float for days before sinking — endangering boats of all sizes, from commercial vessels to recreational sailboats.

The sporting body World Sailing has reported at least eight instances in which crews had to abandon boats because of collisions with what were believed to be containers. In 2016, sailor Thomas Ruyant was 42 days into a race around the world when his sailboat’s hull split from a sudden crash with what appeared to be a floating container.

“It gives me the shivers just thinking about it,” he said in a video dispatch from his damaged boat as he steered toward shore.

In Sri Lanka, the consequences of the X-Press Pearl accident linger, three years after the ship went down.

Fishermen have seen stocks of key species shrink, and populations of long-lived, slow-reproducing animals such as sea turtles may take several generations to recover.

For his part, Lewis, the volunteer beach cleaner in Washington state, said he wonders about all the debris he doesn’t see wash up on his shores.

“What’s going to happen when it gets down deep and, you know, it just ruptures?” he said. “We know we’ve got a problem on the surface, but I think the bigger problem is what’s on the seafloor.”

Larson and Wieffering reported from Washington, D.C. Bharatha Mallawarachi contributed reporting from Colombo, Sri Lanka.

This story was supported by funding from the Walton Family Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

Russ Lewis drives along Long Beach Peninsula as he searches for garbage to clean up in Pacific County, Wash., Monday, June 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Russ Lewis collects garbage along Long Beach Peninsula in Pacific County, Wash., Monday, June 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

FILE - A volunteer holds plastic pellets spilled from a transport ship collected from a beach in Nigran, Pontevedra, Spain, Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Lalo R. Villar, File)

FILE - A person walks past detritus in the area between Tranum and Slette beach in Denmark, Saturday, Dec. 23, 2023, a day after a Maersk ship dropped 46 containers off the coast between Bulbjerg and Svinkloev in the northwestern part of Jutland, during storm Pia. (Claus Bjoern Larsen/Ritzau Scanpix via AP, File)

FILE - People walk past stranded containers in the area between Tranum and Slette beach in Denmark, Saturday, Dec. 23, 2023, a day after a Maersk ship dropped 46 containers off the coast between Bulbjerg and Svinkloev in the northwestern part of Jutland, during storm Pia. (Claus Bjoern Larsen/Ritzau Scanpix via AP, File)

FILE - A Sri Lankan navy soldier wearing a protective suit walks on mounds of debris that washed ashore from the burning Singaporean ship X-Press Pearl which is anchored off Colombo port at Kapungoda, on the outskirts of Colombo, Sri Lanka, Thursday, May 27, 2021. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena, File)

FILE - In this photo provided by Sri Lanka Air Force, smoke rises from the container vessel X-Press Pearl engulfed in flames off Colombo port, Sri Lanka, Wednesday, May 26, 2021. (Sri Lanka Air Force via AP, File)

This March 30, 2021, photo provided by Jon Brack and the Friends of Midway Atoll shows a refrigerator which washed up on the shore of Midway Atoll, a national wildlife refuge for millions of seabirds near the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific Ocean. (Jon Brack, Friends of Midway Atoll via AP)

FILE - The Geosund salvaging ship lifts a container from the seabed off the northwestern coast of the Netherlands on Monday, Jan. 21, 2019, after the MSC Zoe freighter was caught in a heavy storm earlier in the month. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong, File)

FILE - A man looks at the Panamanian-registered container ship MSC Chitra that days earlier collided with the MV-Khalijia-II, a St. Kitts registered ship, in the Arabian Sea near Mumbai, India, Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2010. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade, File)

This image from video provided by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute shows fish and other sea life around a shipping container lost from the cargo vessel Med Taipei during a storm in February 2004, found around 1,280 meters (4,200 feet) below the surface of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in California on Dec. 12, 2013. (MBARI via AP)

This combination of Monday, June 17, 2024, photos, shows top row from left, a plastic turkey, a container of tennis balls, a child's helmet; and bottom row from left, a toy football, a plastic squirt gun and a Crocs shoe, found by Russ Lewis after they washed up on Long Beach Peninsula in Pacific County, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

This image provided by W K Webster shows dislodged containers on the cargo ship ONE Apus at Osaka Bay, Japan, on Dec. 7, 2020, after the ship hit heavy swells on a voyage from China to California in November 2020. (W K Webster via AP)

Russ Lewis points towards a nearby protected nesting zone for snowy plovers as he collects garbage along Long Beach Peninsula in Pacific County, Wash., Monday, June 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Russ Lewis points at the wear on a piece of plastic foam he found during a cleanup along Long Beach Peninsula in Pacific County, Wash., Monday, June 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Volunteer beach cleaner Russ Lewis holds detritus of shipping container spills washed up on Washington's Long Beach Peninsula in Pacific County, Wash., Monday, June 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

FILE - Containers are piled up at a cargo terminal of Deutsche Bahn in Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, April 26, 2023. In the background is the European Central Bank building. (AP Photo/Michael Probst, File)

FILE - Gantry cranes load cargo onto container ships at a port of Kwai Tsing Container Terminals in Hong Kong, Friday, May 24, 2019. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung, File)

An Israeli airstrike on an apartment in central Beirut has killed nine people, according to Lebanon's health ministry. Israel has been pounding areas of the country where the Hezbollah militant group has a strong presence since late September, but has rarely struck in the heart of the capital.

There was no warning before the strike late Wednesday, which hit an apartment in central Beirut not far from the United Nations headquarters, the prime minister’s office and parliament. Hezbollah’s civil defense unit said seven of its members were killed.

The strike came as Israel was pursuing a ground incursion into Lebanon against Hezbollah, while also conducting strikes in Gaza that killed dozens, including children. The Israeli military said eight soldiers have died in the conflict in southern Lebanon.

Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire across the Lebanon border almost daily since the day after Hamas’ cross-border attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 others hostage. Israel declared war on the militant group in the Gaza Strip in response. More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in the territory, and just over half the dead have been women and children, according to local health officials.

Here is the latest:

BEIRUT — The Israeli military has ordered the evacuation of villages and towns in southern Lebanon that are north of a United Nations-declared buffer zone established after the 2006 war. The warning issued Thursday signaled a possible broadening of Israel’s incursion into southern Lebanon, which until now has been confined to areas close to the border.

BEIRUT —Lebanon’s Health Ministry Thursday said that at least nine people were killed in an Israeli strike in central Beirut, as it is also running DNA tests on remains they have obtained to identify others.

Hezbollah said that seven paramedics and rescue workers from its medical arm the Islamic Health Committee were killed in the strike that hit its office in Bashoura. The Health Ministry said 14 others were wounded in the strike early Thursday.

Prior to the attack, the ministry said that 55 people were killed and 156 others were wounded in Israeli strikes over Lebanon on Wednesday.

The frequent strikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs as well as occasional strikes in central Beirut have exacerbated Lebanon’s displacement crisis. The government estimated days ago that some one million people are currently displaced in the cash-strapped country.

Environment Minister Nasser Yassin, who is spearheading the government’s response efforts to the war, told local media that some 167,000 Syrians left Lebanon over the past 24 hours alone. The Associated Press could not independently confirm.

JERUSALEM — The Israeli military said Thursday that it killed a senior Hamas leader in an airstrike in the Gaza Strip around three months ago.

It said that a strike on an underground compound in northern Gaza killed Rawhi Mushtaha and two other Hamas commanders, Sameh Siraj and Sameh Oudeh.

There was no immediate comment from Hamas.

The military said the three commanders had taken refuge in a fortified underground compound in northern Gaza that served as a command and control center.

It said Mushtaha was a close associate of Yahya Sinwar, the top leader of Hamas who helped mastermind the Oct. 7 attack into Israel that triggered the war.

Sinwar is believed to be alive and in hiding inside Gaza.

NICOSIA, Cyprus — The British government chartered more flights to help U.K. nationals leave Lebanon, a day after an evacuation flight left Beirut.

The government said in a statement that the flights will continue as “long as the security situation allows” and that it’s working to increase capacity on commercial flights for British nationals.

U.K. Defense Secretary John Healey on Wednesday visited a British military base on Cyprus where around 700 troops, Foreign Office staff and Border Force officers have been deployed to a British military base in Cyprus to help with evacuation plans.

British nationals and their spouses, partners and children under the age of 18 are eligible. Dependents who aren’t British nationals will need a valid visa granting a maximum six-month stay in the U.K.

BEIRUT — An Israeli strike in the Lebanese capital Beirut killed seven health and rescue workers, an Islamic health organization said.

The airstrike in the residential Bashoura district targeted an apartment in a multi-story building that houses an office of the Health Society, a group of civilian first responders affiliated to Hezbollah.

It was the closest strike to the central downtown district of Beirut, where the United Nations and government offices are located.

It was the second airstrike to hit central Beirut this week and the second to directly target the Health Society in 24 hours. No Israeli warning was issued to the area before it was hit. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the strike in central Beirut or the allegations it used phorphorous bombs.

Israel has mostly concentrated its airstrikes in south and eastern Lebanon, as well as the southern suburbs of Beirut where Hezbollah has a strong presence, but its attacks have spanned the entire country and killed many civilians.

Beirut’s southern suburbs also saw heavy bombardment overnight in areas where the Israeli army had earlier issued a warning online for residents to evacuate.

TOKYO — Japan on Thursday dispatched two Self Defense Force planes to prepare for a possible airlift of Japanese citizens from Lebanon.

Two C-2 transport aircraft are expected to arrive in Jordan and Greece on Friday, Japan NHK national television reported.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters that there has been no report of injury involving the about 50 Japanese nationals in Lebanon.

Japan dispatched SDF aircraft in October and November 2023 to evacuate more than 100 Japanese and South Korean citizens from Israel.

SYDNEY — Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said on Thursday her government had booked 500 seats on commercial aircraft for Australian citizens, permanent residents and their families to leave Lebanon on Saturday.

The seats are available to 1,700 Australians and their families known to be in Lebanon on two flights from Beirut to Cyprus, Wong said.

“What I would say to Australians who wish to leave, please take whatever option is available to you,” Wong told reporters in Geelong, Australia.

“Please do not wait for your preferred route,” she added.

A Hezbollah paramedic walks between debris after an airstrike hit an apartment in a multistory building, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Lebanese women stand in front an apartment in a multistory building hit by Israeli airstrike, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A destroyed apartment in a multistory building hit by Israeli airstrike, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Hezbollah paramedics walk between debris after an airstrike hit an apartment in a multistory building, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A woman reacts in front an apartment in a multistory building hit by Israeli airstrike, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

This image from United Nations Television, shows Israel Ambassador Danny Danon during a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (UNTV via AP)

Soldiers carry the coffin of Israeli Army Capt. Eitan Yitzhak Oster, who was killed in action in Lebanon, during his funeral at Mt. Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

An Israeli Apache helicopter releases flares near the Israeli-Lebanon border, as seen from northern Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)

Smoke rises from the site of an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

Police stand guard at the site of an apparent Israeli airstrike in Damascus, Syria, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki)

Workers clean at the site of an apparent Israeli airstrike in Damascus, Syria, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki)

People collecting remains of victims after an airstrike that hit an apartment in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A firefighter stands in front of an apartment hit by an Israeli airstrike, in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)