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Practice makes perfect, especially if you want to avoid a major mistake on the world stage. I’m Brian Banmiller on Business.

Recently the Suez Canal became clogged by a large ship called the Ever Given. Thanks to high winds and a sandstorm the cargo ship became wedged and bottlenecked the world’s busiest shipping route. In order to prevent the same thing from happening to them, ship captains are spending extra time in replica routes. In the middle of a French forest is a stretch of water built to train captains how to navigate the canal. It’s built to one twenty-fifth the scale of the real canal and trainees have to steer through scale models of massive container ships without getting stuck. The facility cannot create sandstorms but it can whip up wind gusts to push ships against each other. Steering problems and engine outages are also simulated to see how trainees will react. There is also a miniature San Francisco bay and a Port Arthur, Texas to help people train to dock and maneuver ships at crowded ports. And thanks to the recent Suez incident, business is booming. Brian Banmiller, CBS News.

About Brian

CBS News Radio national business journalist Brian Banmiller has spent more than 40 years in the news industry, covering business, politics and the economy on television, radio and in print. Currently, his “Banmiller on Business” reports are delivered to an audience of millions nationwide.