Comment by wolfgang42

I’ve heard from some people involved in the shipping industry that (based on the size of the incident) this ship is probably going to declare General Average, which is a sort of weird concept that AFAIK doesn’t really have a parallel on land. It’s basically, “we’ve lost an awful lot of cargo—everyone who had stuff on board, chip in to pay for what got lost.” From what I understand, the idea is that you don’t want to waste time in an emergency trying to figure out which cargo is OK to jettison, so the shippers whose stuff arrived safely pay the ones who didn’t for their sacrifice, but I imagine it can be quite the surprise bill.