Some 220 overboard sea containers located in North Sea

Dutch public works department Rijkswaterstaat and shipping company MSC have located around 220 of an estimated 281 containers that fell off ship MSC Zoe in the North Sea last week. Most of the containers, located with the help of sonar boats, are at the bottom of the North Sea, near the Wadden Islands, a spokesperson for Rijkswaterstaat said to NU.nl.

A total of 18 containers already washed a shore in the Wadden Sea area. The number that has now been found is somewhere around 220, according to the spokesperson. As they were located with sonar images, the exact number can not yet be given. That means that around 43 containers are still missing.

How the containers will be retrieved is not yet clear. The hope is that they are all still closed, and have not lost any of their content.

The containers that washed ashore caused a great deal of pollution on the beaches and dunes of the Wadden Islands. Volunteers as well as soldiers have been working on cleaning this up for days. Some 220 tons of waste was collected from the beach on Schiermonnikoog in three days, for example. This mainly involved paint rollers, soap pumps, children's toys, rolls of cleaning wipes, and shoes.