The tanker Navigator Europa, moored outside the Targa LPG export terminal, caught fire today, shutting down a section of the Houston Ship Channel. The tanker is reported to be carrying ethylene, a chemical used in making plastic.  The cause of the fire is under investigation.  It was just another day on the very busy and highly congested waterway known for collisions, spills, and fires.  In October of this year, the channel was shut down by a tug and barge which partially sank in the channel.  In July, a collision between two barges caused a spill and a fire which shut down the channel. In March, Conti Peridot, a Liberian bulk carrier, and the Danish-flagged Carla Maersk, a chemical tanker, collided in the channel resulting in the spill of up to 216,000 barrels of methyl tert-butyl ether, or MTBE, a toxic chemical.

And on and on it goes. Collisions, groundings, and fires are not that unusual on a waterway which on an average day in 2013 saw 38 tankers, 22 freighters, a cruise ship, 345 towboats, 6 public vessels, 297 ferries, 25 other transits, and 75 ships in port, according to Coast Guard data. “Sometimes you can meet and be overtaken by a handful of ships, 10 to 15 of them,” says Tim Gunn, a tugboat captain for Buffalo Marine Service who has navigated these waters for 13 years. “When I first started it seemed like two or three.”

The city of Houston, Texas was a backwater cotton port a hundred years ago. It was located on the shores of the Buffalo Bayou which was only around ten feet deep. Ships were unloaded in Galveston, on the Gulf coast, and loaded into barges to be towed to Houston.  In 1901, however, the Spindletop gusher in nearby Beaumont began what would be known as the Texas Oil Boom. In Houston, dredging for the ship channel began in 1912 and was completed in 1914. The channel was 22 feet deep and two miles longer than the Panama Canal. Today the Houston Ship Channel is is 45 feet deep with a width of 530 feet.  As the channel has been dredged deeper and wider ever larger ships are now able to ply the waterway.

Last year Bloomberg published and article, Big Ships Play Texas Chicken in Congested Houston Channel, which described how in certain stretches of the channel, the shipboard pilots execute a maneuver called “Texas Chicken.” The “maneuver requires two ships to chart a course for a head-on collision, then swerve right, and use each other’s wave pressure to move safely past.”

“We’re still trying to stuff these bigger ships up these tiny ditches,” says Captain Mike Morris, presiding officer of the Houston Pilots, the corps of 95 mariners licensed to guide ships on the six-hour trip up the channel. “Everywhere you look in the port, we’re expanding.”

With the upcoming expansion of the Panama Canal, Houston can expect to see a new generation of even larger container ships calling at the port, only adding to the congestion of the already congested channel.