Several major carriers, the U.S. Navy and the Japanese Coast Guard are rerouting ships to maintain distance from tsunami debris.
Houses, cars and tractor-trailers washed out to sea by a 28-foot tsunami are clogging shipping lanes off Japan, posing a bigger challenge to U.S. Navy vessels and commercial lines than radiation from a leaking nuclear plant.
Japan’s coast guard posts daily reports about the debris on the Internet, using information gathered from passing vessels. As of April 4, it was recommending that vessels stay up to 90 nautical miles out while passing the zone that suffered the brunt of the destruction from the natural disasters — a 240 nautical-mile stretch from Ibaraki prefecture near Tokyo to Miyagi prefecture in the northeast.
Floating debris can damage ship propellers, which can take a week to replace and at a cost of several million yen.