Tuesday 15 March 2022 · below the Index · spike
Ever Forward container ship grounding
The Ever Forward, a 12,000 TEU container ship operated by Evergreen, ran aground in Chesapeake Bay near Norfolk, Virginia on March 15, 2022. Salvage and dredging efforts began immediately to refloat the vessel. The incident recalled the Ever Given's blockage of the Suez Canal exactly one year earlier.
Peak 108.0 on Thursday 17 March 2022. The shaded band is the incident window.
Where the attention came from
Over the whole window this ran Media-led; on the peak day itself it read Mixed. When the two differ, the fast signals (social, news) spiked and faded while the slow ones (search, research) carried the tail. Mixed means no single signal dominated — the attention was spread across search, research, news and social. Social here is X alone — Bluesky only joins the series from July 2024 — so its level isn't directly comparable with today's series, though its share of this incident is real.
Bar = share of the extra attention over the whole window; the tick marks the share on the peak day alone, where the two differ.
How unusual it was
This was above 88% of all days since 2020, and the highest since Sunday 6 March 2022.
How far it spread
Spilled over — 2 of 6 vessel-type groups drew clearly more readers than usual.
Gas-carrier readership was already running high through this window on the European gas crisis that followed the invasion of Ukraine — including the US–EU gas supply deal announced on 25 March 2022 — so this lift belongs to the energy story, not to this incident.
Container & cargo ships rose on just one day of the window, staying flat either side — readership of a vessel-type article can jump for a day on one popular link or an unrelated story about the same vessel type.
Readers here means readers of the Wikipedia article on each vessel type — the same source as the Research signal, not news coverage — so an incident can dominate the news without moving this panel. Bars start at 1× — normal readership for that vessel type, the weeks before the incident. Grey = no clear lift. "Over time" shows each group's daily readers through the window; "All 12 articles" breaks the six groups back into their members.
How it was framed the frame glossary →
Lead frame: human drama. Trade press was 0% of in-scope coverage — the story had left the trade press and gone mainstream. (Historical coverage is scored on headlines only.)
Acting, or acted upon
In 81% of coverage shipping was the thing acted upon rather than the actor.
How the coverage sounded
Coverage ran 55% negative overall; 13% strongly so.
Each article is scored on a five-step scale from strongly negative to strongly positive; the bar is the share of coverage at each step.
Maritime Attention Index, incident: Ever Forward container ship grounding, peak 108.0 on 17 March 2022. maritimeattentionindex.com/incidents/2022-ever-forward-container-ship-grounding/