accident and container falling at Sea - legos washed ashore !!

In the deep Ocean getting washed to beaches are numerous things – yet this is different.  On a stormy day, out in the Ocean, thousands of  plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs fell from a cargo ship and were lost at sea.  Ever since,  these durable plastic bath toys have been floating around the world,  landing in Japan, Alaska and Hawaii and even spending years frozen in an Arctic ice pack.  Marine Cargo in transit, packed neatly and stowed in a 40-foot shipping container, rough seas and huge waves knocked the bath toys overboard, along with several other containers that sank straight to the ocean floor.

Lego is a popular line of construction toys manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of colourful interlocking plastic bricks and an accompanying array of gears, minifigures and various other parts. Lego bricks can be assembled and connected in many ways, to construct such objects as vehicles, buildings, and even working robots. Anything constructed can then be taken apart again, and the pieces used to make other objects. Lego began manufacturing interlocking toy bricks in 1949. As of 2013, around 560 billion Lego parts had been produced.

In 1997, the container ship Tokio Express was hit by an incredibly strong wave that tilted the ship, knocking 62 containers into the sea, just 20 miles from Land's End in Cornwall.  One of the containers held 4.8 million pieces of Lego, bound for New York and now, decades later, tiny pieces of the plastic construction toys continue to wash up along both the north and south coasts of Cornwall, as well as Devon, Wales and Ireland. Ironically, millions were destined for toy kits depicting sea adventures. Children in Cornwall found octopuses, dragons, diver flippers and sea grass pieces washed ashore and, thanks to an inventory provided by a Dutch shipping clerk, beach walkers in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas are now looking out for the arrival of other elements, such as tiny plastic yellow rafts, swords, pistols, hats, flippers and spear guns.

Fly swatters bearing sports team logos coasted onto Kodiak island, Alaska, by the dozens -  Beachcombers at first assumed they were debris from the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, but authorities soon traced them to a cargo ship that had lost a row of containers that came loose from a cable during a Pacific crossing four months earlier.  Rogue oddities riding the waves are no surprise when you consider that the international liner shipping industry carries approximately 100 million containers of cargo each year. Each container is the size of a semi-truck trailer, and the ships' decks can be stacked seven containers high. Careful distribution of weight is essential, to say the least. Losing a few containers during big storms is nearly unstoppable.

Four months after a storm off the California coast dumped 15 containers into the ocean in 2004, scientists with the Monterey Bay Aquarium discovered one of the containers was providing an unique artificial habitat for marine life—with 1,100 steel-belted radial tires still trapped inside. "Cargo practices have since improved, but in the 1990s as many as ten thousand containers may have gone overboard each year,” Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano report in their book, Flotsametrics and the Floating World.  Ebbesmeyer earned credit  in this flotsam arena when he accurately modelled the arrival time and place of two separate shipments of Nike shoes lost in the Pacific in the 1990s. In the first incident, which was Ebbesmeyer’s inspiration to follow flotsam in the first place, eight containers jumped ship in transit from Korea during a mid-Pacific storm in 1990, sending adrift some 80,000 individual, unlaced shoes.

Though the plastic daisies dropped into the sea in Feb 1997 from Tokio Express have been found on Cornish shores; none knows exactly what happened next, or even what was in the other 61 containers.  A quirk of fate meant many of the Lego items were nautical-themed, so locals and tourists alike started finding miniature cutlasses, flippers, spear guns, seagrass, scuba gear as well as the dragons and the daisies.  There is a Facebook page that documents the Lego discoveries, and its keeper received an email from someone in Melbourne who found a flipper which they think could be from the Tokio Express spillage.  Experts say that it  takes three years for sea debris to cross the Atlantic ocean, from Land's End to Florida. Undoubtedly some Lego has crossed and it's most likely some has gone around the world.   

"The most profound lesson I've learned from the Lego story is that things that go to the bottom of the sea don't always stay there," Ebbesmeyer adds. The incident is a perfect example of how even when inside a steel container, sunken items don't stay sunken. They can be carried around the world, seemingly randomly, but subject to the planet's currents and tides. But there's also a dark side to the story, he says. If Lego is on land then it's fun. If it's on the ocean it's deadly, a poison for birds. If you lose one container with 5m pieces of Lego in it, that is a catastrophe for wildlife.

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

9^th Feb 2015

News collated from various sources including Daily Mail; BBC and SMH.