They were on a ship that lost part of its cargo in a freak wave in 1997: after more than 26 years, they are still being found
On February 13, 1997, an unusual wave more than eight meters high caused a large freighter to crash about 35 kilometers (22 miles) from Land’s End, the westernmost tip of Cornwall, the peninsula in southwest England. The ship was called Tokio Express, was on its way to New York and lost 62 of its containers on board in the wave, including one with 4,756,940 Lego bricks of different shapes.
This event was nicknamed “the great Lego disaster” and is also considered the worst toy environmental disaster due to the spread of a large amount of plastic pieces into the sea. Even though more than 26 years have passed, Lego bricks that have ended up in the sea continue to turn up on Cornwall’s beaches, especially after storms.
Ironically, many of these pieces have marine themes, such as octopuses, rafts, and fins, and there are people who spend much of their time searching for them to collect, catalog, or collect, or simply to To clear beaches of dirt.
The most active of these people is probably Tracey Williams, an environmentalist who lives in Cornwall and has been traveling to the area’s beaches for years to find Lego bricks and document them. It started as a small hobby, she said recently, but it has now become a full-time job for her.
We know exactly how many Lego bricks were lost at sea because oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer asked the company in 1997 what exactly the container contained, Williams said. Among other things, there were 520,541 green bricks, 28,700 yellow inflatable boats, 52,000 red propellers, 33,427 black dragons, 4,200 black octopuses, 514 green dragons and more than 15,000 sharks, as well as accessories in other shapes, such as flowers and swords. No shark has ever been found.
In addition to taking into account what she has collected, Williams shares the photos and comments from people like her who search for them on the Lego Lost at Sea page, which has around 150,000 followers between Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Williams also recently published a book on the subject.
Of the nearly 5 million bricks on board, just over 3.1 million were light enough to swim to English beaches within a short period of time, the BBC reported in 2014. The ones we find today are both of those , which remained afloat as well as those that had previously sunk and then returned to the surface thanks to the currents, Williams told LiveScience.
Alongside her, there are also tourists, volunteers and activists who fight against the use of plastic and search for and collect Legos that have returned from the sea after over 26 years. One of them is Rob Arnold, who lives in the Whitsand Bay area and says he and a group of people have collected 25 million pieces of plastic and microplastics from Cornwall’s beaches over the years. There are more than a thousand Lego bricks, including 240 pairs of diving fins.
A few years ago, Delia Webb, an activist with the environmental group Cornish Plastic Pollution Coalition, told the news site Cornwall Live that because of the shape of the peninsula and the sea currents, a bit of everything tends to end up on the area’s beaches. The plastic that ends up in the sea for one reason or another, like the Lego pieces of 1997, reaches the coast in almost perfect condition because it is extremely resistant, but before it gets there it poses a great danger to marine animals Risk of taking it. This is one of the reasons why his club tries to keep the beaches clean and why, according to Webb, “it is a type of pollution that needs to be dealt with, just like the litter lying around.”
– Also read: The strange discovery of American ketchup jars on the beaches of Puglia
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