[HN Gopher] Is that ship still stuck?
___________________________________________________________________
Is that ship still stuck?
Author : ColinWright
Score : 1361 points
Date : 2021-03-25 20:58 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (istheshipstillstuck.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (istheshipstillstuck.com)
| gm3dmo wrote:
| Smit are like the Winston Wolf of the shipping business. No
| problem too big to solve.
| ic0n0cl4st wrote:
| This reminds me a lot of an immersive art installation I saw in
| Turkey 6 years ago of an imagined future where an oil tanker got
| stuck in the Bosphorous and permanently changed local society.
|
| https://worldarchitecture.org/architecture-news/ccehp/strait...
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Why do so many people here think they have some solution that
| could get this done faster? There is an entire industry that is
| built around heavy salvage, and their best and brightest are
| working around the clock to resolve the situation.
|
| Everybody here knows what Dunning Kruger is.
|
| If you have a solution that starts with: "Why don't they
| just...". The answer is either 1. They will when they can, that
| kind of operation is very hard to set up in the Egyptian Desert,
| or 2. That is a dumb/impractical/impossible thing you are
| suggesting.
| testfoobar wrote:
| Moving sand is easier than moving a ship+20K containers or
| removing the 20K containers in hopes of refloating the ship.
|
| So the easiest solution would be to widen the canal at this point
| - where the ship is currently located and where the ship will
| need to go as it refloats and turns. Move the banks further back.
| In effect create a place with enough room for a ship of this size
| to turnaround.
|
| The canal isn't that deep. Dredgers can be brought on both banks
| in front and behind the ship. Four dredging teams ought to knock
| this out pretty quickly.
| the_local_host wrote:
| How do you get the ship to fall into the hole at the right
| moment?
| testplzignore wrote:
| Slap a "free to a good home" sign on it and let the people take
| back what is rightfully theirs. Ever Given Day shall be
| celebrated every year commemorating the moment when the free
| market failed.
|
| "Mommy, did you really get a shipping container full of crockpots
| when you were my age?" "Yes, my child. We cooked like kings for
| many a season."
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Suez canal blocked by a massive ship_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560319 - March 2021 (419
| comments)
|
| Also ongoing:
|
| _It 'Might Take Weeks' to Free Ship Stuck in Suez Canal_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585480 - March 2021 (23
| comments)
|
| _Suez Canal: How are they trying to free the Ever Given?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586278 - March 2021 (44
| comments)
| fortran77 wrote:
| You'd think Elon would call the captain some awful names and then
| claim he can free it with his flamethrower and submarine!
| throwawaybutwhy wrote:
| Fun facts:
|
| 1. The owner is Japanese
|
| 2. The operator is Taiwanese
|
| 3. The flag is Panamanian
|
| 4. The cargo is Chinese
|
| 5. The insurer is British
|
| 6. The crew is Indian
|
| 7. The canal is Egyptian and was built with forced labor by the
| French
|
| 8. The dredgers/salvage op managers are Dutch
| toyota86 wrote:
| > The flag is Panamanian
|
| That's an interesting way to say tax evasion.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| At least in the northeast, it's common in the US OTR trucking
| industry to register the trailers in Maine. Registration fees
| in Maine are significantly less than in neighboring states.
| You'll also see a lot of recreational trailers (boats, RVs)
| registered in Maine.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Try telling Panama they don't have a right to create their
| own tax laws. If they want to incentivize ships to register
| in their country, they're a sovereign nation and can do that.
| sn_master wrote:
| And avoiding minimum wage and maintenance requirements too.
| kortilla wrote:
| That's not tax evasion. Tax evasion is explicitly illegal and
| if you do it you get arrested/fined an outsized amount.
|
| The term you're looking for is "tax avoidance".
| Lionga wrote:
| That's an interesting way to say we should obliged to all the
| shitfuckery the goverments do and not look for better
| countries for what we want to do. Competition between
| goverments to end their shitfuckery would be so horrible.
| movedx wrote:
| Go, go gadget globalisation!
|
| Seriously though that's pretty amazing.
|
| Fun fact: corporations used to exist for a limit period of
| time, to solve a particular problem, and were then dissolved.
| With the introduction of indefinite corporations, we end up
| with cool setups like those /u/throwawaybutwhy has highlighted.
| Mockapapella wrote:
| When and where did they exist for a limited period of time?
| It never even occurred to me that this was an option
| brian_cloutier wrote:
| The first European joint-stock corporations were for single
| voyages. Everyone would band together and fund a ship to go
| somewhere, then split the earnings and dissolve the
| corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint-
| stock_company#Early_join...
| sneak wrote:
| It's pretty much still like that now, except the last
| step is "go work for Google for a few years in golden
| handcuffs".
| zinekeller wrote:
| Apparently, in the Philippines until it was revised in 2019
| companies are required to have a limited lifespan with a
| maximum lifespan of 50 years.
| (https://www.pwc.com/ph/en/taxwise-or-otherwise/2020/on-
| the-l...)
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Railways.
| nullsense wrote:
| 9. Everybody is fucked
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Pretty much summed up the current world order...
| sn_master wrote:
| 9. The destination is the Netherlands (Rotterdam).
|
| While we're at it, the 1956 Suez canal crisis marked the end of
| the traditional colonial powers when the USSR threatened to
| nuke London and Paris if they don't let Egypt regain control of
| the canal.
|
| https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/yes-1956-suez-crisi...
| yccs27 wrote:
| 10. The technical manager is German (BS Shipmanagement)
| turing_complete wrote:
| Small correction. Egypt do not regain the canal, they seized
| the canal.
|
| Not egypt, but the Suez Canal company was was not the
| legitimate owner of the canal.
|
| Interestingly, it was the disapproval of the US under
| Eisenhower that stopped the military action of Britain and
| France that ended their intervention.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Company
| sn_master wrote:
| well, they gained control by seizing the canal then lost it
| due to the invasion, hence why I said 'regain'. Both the
| Soviet and US pressure resulted in the stop of the
| invasion, but certainly the USSR had an important role, if
| anything to distract the media from its invasion of
| Hungary.
| tim333 wrote:
| Britain didn't really distinguish itself overthrowing the
| democratic government in Iran to protect BPs profits in
| 1953. I guess Eisenhower thought enough of this stuff.
| Black101 wrote:
| Get Elon's boring machines to dig in the right location(s) ...
| bronlund wrote:
| Internet at it's best!
| lkebin wrote:
| If fire a bomb from one side of ship, Does the wave can push out
| ship stuck ?
| Zhenya wrote:
| Can't wait for elon to offer a solution...
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586145.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| It would be some decent PR to send over some Boring Company
| equipment
| sliken wrote:
| Wherever the anchor attaches is likely to be designed for
| quite a bit of force.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I know that is a joke but if you wanted to generate enough
| force to push the ship off the bank, a rocket is one of the few
| technologies that would do the trick. I wouldn't want to stand
| downwind, though.
| rektide wrote:
| you are thinking 1.0 scale. you need to start thinking
| starlink scale enterprising. quantity not quality. one rocket
| would rip the ship into pieces. what's actually needed is a
| long 2d matrix of rockets, distributed broadly the across
| EVER GIVEN, pushing the bow in, the stern out & back. out
| like she came.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Might as well make them fireworks while you're at it so
| there can either be a celebration at the end or, even
| better, a celebration of failure.
| m4rtink wrote:
| This is starting to really resemble how people build ships
| in Space Engineers. :)
| avereveard wrote:
| The number of thruster used there is more of a limitation
| in thrust power than in rigidity, grids don't flex and
| thruster off center placement don't generate momentum
| Zhenya wrote:
| Except that the side of the ship isn't load bearing. Not
| sure how'd that work out.
| divbzero wrote:
| Strap it to a Falcon Heavy.
| Aeolun wrote:
| How many falcon heavies would we need to lift 200,000 metric
| tons?
| bzbarsky wrote:
| To be clear, 200,000 tons is the weight of the cargo+fuel
| this ship carries, not counting the structure of the ship
| itself. I haven't found a good number for the displacement
| (the total weight, including the ship), and would be
| curious to know what it is.
| nate_meurer wrote:
| Wikipedia says the Triple-E class container ships have an
| empty displacement of 55Kt. Assuming the Golden class is
| similar, with a summer deadweight of 200Kt, it seems a
| loaded displacement of 250Kt is possible.
|
| I read in a random news story that the Ever Given's
| displacement on this voyage is about 220Kt.
|
| Note that the units are long tons, which means that ship
| weighs close to 250,000 american tons, or five hundred
| million pounds.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I feel like it's generally more helpful to stick with SI
| units if you're already there :)
| nate_meurer wrote:
| I agree, and I think these weights are in fact now
| reported as metric tons, not imperial long tons. The
| difference is insignificant for purposes of casual
| conversation.
| bzbarsky wrote:
| Thank you, that is exactly the sort of info I was looking
| for!
| themgt wrote:
| Apparently Falcon Heavy has 5 million lbs of thrust, so
| about 88 Falcon Heavies?
|
| SuperHeavy will have 17 million lbs of thrust so if Elon
| could deliver 25 SuperHeavy boosters with a total of 700
| Raptor engines it could lift the Ever Given? Someone should
| simulate this in Kerbal.
| trothamel wrote:
| If we're going unrealistic, there are even better plans:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guMumPFBag&t=123s
| meowster wrote:
| I'm no naval architect, but wouldn't the ship break in
| two once the robot tries to pick it up? It would for sure
| break apart due to centrifugal force while being swung.
|
| I like movies where I can suspend belief (monsters and
| giant robots), but I hate it when they get the regular
| real stuff wrong.
| m4rtink wrote:
| You mean those tiny helicopters that can each lift
| thousands of tons of super robot mass, right ? And they
| can do that while flying in perfect formation! ;-)
| elihu wrote:
| Tell him Egypt is planning to use a hundred Ford F150s to drag
| the boat, and see how quick he can get a comparable number of
| Cybertrucks and/or model Ss and 3s to show up.
|
| (Realistically, Egypt would probably use bulldozers if they
| actually wanted to go that route.)
| dexterdog wrote:
| If we're going to pick vaporware for the job why not use the
| Tesla semi?
| elihu wrote:
| I guess it depends how many prototypes of either vehicle
| exist, and how long it would take to get them to Egypt.
| Rounding up a hundred of something that's already in
| production like the S or the 3 would be easier. (They'd
| have to add trailer hitches or something, though.)
| sn_master wrote:
| Check this out, its real and not vaporware:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3yw4Qp8bX4
| elihu wrote:
| Yeah, having a granny gear would help out a lot. I assume
| the Tesla is most likely to be direct-drive.
|
| That demo with the Volvo was 750 tons. According to
| Wikipedia, the Ever Given has a deadweight tonage of just
| under 200,000 tons. That's the cargo capacity, not
| including the ship itself. Let's say the ship and cargo
| is around 250,000 tons, that means you'd need about 333
| of those Volvo trucks to drag it, assuming about the same
| amount of friction pulling the ship as a truck pulling a
| trailer. That's probably optimistic, so you might need
| more like 500 to 1,000 trucks to get it unstuck.
|
| In terms of realistic options, at this point I'm thinking
| they're most likely to get it out by pulling it with a
| lot of heavy earthmoving equipment and/or tugboats while
| they bring in some dredging equipment to shift the sand
| or whatever it's stuck on out of the way. If it's run
| aground on something solid they can't vaccum up with
| dredging equipment, I don't know what they'll do. It'll
| probably just be stuck for a long time until they can
| unload it or something.
|
| On the other hand, maybe it'll just come loose at some
| high tide. I mean, however it got stuck it seems like it
| should be at least theoretically possible to get unstuck.
| sn_master wrote:
| > you'd need about 333 of those Volvo trucks to drag it
|
| You can re-use the trucks tho, the operation doesn't have
| to be in parallel (and it can't anyway, because the
| containers are stacked).
| sn_master wrote:
| I mean, a single Volvo semi was able to move 750 tons, and
| it's in production, unlike the Tesla Semi.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3yw4Qp8bX4
| rohitb91 wrote:
| Which citizen and insult will he come up with next
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| This time perhaps he'll hire a private investigator who isn't
| a total huckster.
|
| Better yet just hire dozens and wait until one shakes
| something loose that way he can substantiate his bullshit
| before he spews it.
| tamaharbor wrote:
| Drop salt around the ship to increase the buoyancy of the
| water...
| a9h74j wrote:
| I know meta-posts are discouraged, but folks, you were supposed
| to be _micro_ dosing.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Looking at how stuck the ship is, this could also be a new
| terrorist vector to attack the channel via such a ,,derailed"
| ship.
| Tenoke wrote:
| It does legitimately seem like you can do tremendous damage by
| derailing a few ships in the right spots. Bringing bombs or
| other small ships or something else seems doable for a
| terrorist organization on the face of it.
| WWWWH wrote:
| Wasn't this the plot of an Ian Banks novel? Canal dreams.
| Imagine die hard, with the Bruce Willis part being a middle-
| aged, female, Japanese cellist.
| bigfudge wrote:
| This is true more generally. When I lived in London and the
| IRA campaign was going on I never understood why they didn't
| just set fire to a few stolen vans on Euston road/City
| road/Waterloo bridge every morning rather than actually
| killing people. Would have been more effective.
| simmerup wrote:
| What freedom fighter would throw away their life to cause a
| traffic jam?
|
| And what government would cave to whats essentially a minor
| inconvenience
| bigfudge wrote:
| At the time, London transport was pretty much at gridlock
| anyway and made the city pretty hard to live in IMO. It
| wouldn't have taken much to threaten the major income-
| generating source of the country (look up the economics
| of the city of London).
|
| I don't even think it requires you to throw your life
| away. It could just be classified as civil disobedience.
|
| To be clear, I had no sympathy at all with the IRAs
| violent campaign. I'm just pointing out that committed
| civil disobedience could be pretty effective if you have
| people committed enough that they will already kill
| people and go to prison quite often (or blow themselves
| up for that matter).
| randompwd wrote:
| Such an ignorant comment.
| bigfudge wrote:
| How so? I lived in the city and this is what I thought at
| the time. I might have been mistaken (which is part why I
| posted it here... to hear alternative arguments).
| moritonal wrote:
| Shh! The modern world is based on the fact a few really mad
| stupid people don't realise how brittle the hacks we built
| society on are.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Now just think how easy some terrorists can block the canal by
| just putting a hole in that sitting ship...
| stadium wrote:
| What's the estimated economic impact of the blockage? Will other
| ships have to wait or is reroute even an option?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| So what do I buy or sell or short to protect my portfolio?
| seized wrote:
| Why not some large pumps, suck up water from the canal and use
| jets to blast the sand out from under the bow. Slowly shift the
| sand around.
|
| Granted they might have to dredge to clear that sand out of the
| canal.
|
| Surely it's been thought of....
| bawbag wrote:
| Not related to this, but is there a company out there who could
| profit from this kind of thing? "I got stuck but my friend made
| it through, prices are up lol".
| tobr wrote:
| The ship is named "Ever Given", but the huge text on the side
| says "EVERGREEN", which is confusingly similar. Does anyone know
| why?
| dbish wrote:
| Evergreen is the company, they probably just want to show that
| more then the ship name
| jacquesm wrote:
| All of that company's ships names start with 'Ever'.
| es7 wrote:
| "Ever Given" is the ship's name
|
| Evergreen is the company that owns (manages?) the ship
| chanandler_bong wrote:
| The company name is Evergreen, the name of the ship is Ever
| Given.
| [deleted]
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| I know that the ship's crew doesn't actually dock the ship in
| ports, and each port has dedicated pilots that board the vessel
| and handle that aspect of the shipment. Is the same true for the
| canal? It seems it would ostensibly be this pilot's "fault" if
| that were the case, but I don't actually know who the pilots work
| for.
| jyriand wrote:
| Archimedes would have a solution for this.
| richardfey wrote:
| This sounds like a great "how ww3 started" intro story for a game
| boboche wrote:
| Elon, we need you ;)
| oliv__ wrote:
| Since it might takes weeks to clear the canal, can anyone here
| comment on the implications this will have on world trade?
| nabla9 wrote:
| The ship stuck (Ever Given) is build to Suezmax limits. It fits,
| but barely.
|
| Ever Given (Suezmax limit) length: 399.94 m (400
| m) tonnage: 199,629 DWT (200,000 DWT)
| [deleted]
| ajb wrote:
| Just another non-expert, but I wonder if the simplest approach
| might be to pump water under it to wash away the sand it's
| beached on.
|
| Googling, it seems that this is a recognised technique for
| dredging: https://www.iadc-dredging.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/07/fac... Whether it works might be
| dependent on what kind of soil its sitting on and whether the
| current is strong enough to take away the dislodged particles.
|
| I guess it would also be hard to work out exactly what you've
| removed and hence whether you leaving the ship in a position that
| will stress its structure too much.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Can someone explain why dredging alone isn't sufficient? Is it
| too slow?
| crazyjncsu wrote:
| I expect dredging will be the main solution. Dredges are just
| slow moving, so they've taken a while to arrive.
|
| I'd also expect some long reach excavators and/or draglines
| to be working from the shore and/or barges.
|
| They probably just underestimated the stuckedness at first.
| Throw in some ineptitude and corruption, and you have this
| royal mess.
| [deleted]
| ajb wrote:
| Are dredges normally expected to access underneath a ship? I
| thought under the typical use cases they have a clear work
| area.
| Havoc wrote:
| Really deep keel in not much water. At shore zero water. Ie
| It's properly stuck
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| How long before this gets made into a Netflix series?
| sn_master wrote:
| We'll need a plot twist then, what would it be?
| robmiller wrote:
| Forgive me if this comment only belongs on Reddit but it's worth
| noting Vice[0] thinks this captain was being a little caviler for
| the lulz of his GPS waypoints.
|
| [0] NSFW https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqwn8/suez-canal-ms-
| ever-gi...
| chovybizzass wrote:
| can't they just add water to the anal canal?
| siraben wrote:
| Is there a website where I can find the historical data of ships
| in the area? Are they still waiting for the ship to get unstuck
| or are now going around southern Africa?
| engineer_22 wrote:
| I wonder if we could liquify the soil and float the ship out of
| the mud.
|
| One could imagine 15 pile drivers pounding on the shore and a
| couple of tugs reversing the ship.
| drno123 wrote:
| One peaceful nuclear explosion would do the trick.
| elihu wrote:
| I suppose I'll kick off the usual "why don't they just do X"
| thread.
|
| It seems to me that if they can't move it by any normal means,
| they could just start pushing cargo containers overboard and fish
| them out until it's light enough to move.
|
| I could also a lot of plausible reasons why they wouldn't do
| that:
|
| - it wouldn't work (no equipment to move containers)
|
| - the ship's owner doesn't want to do that and no one has the
| authority to force them
|
| - the ship's owner wants to do that, but the owner of the cargo
| doesn't want them to
|
| - the cost of lost cargo is more than the cost of delaying other
| ships
|
| - it would take too long or be too messy to clean up
| brundolf wrote:
| Perhaps most importantly: the channel is only a couple dozen
| meters deep, which is part of the problem. Dropping a bunch of
| containers down there would almost certainly create a new
| obstacle for this and other ships
| elihu wrote:
| I had assumed the containers would be retrieved by tugboats
| or whatever works.
|
| Depending on what's in the containers, I'd expect most would
| probably float, at least for a little while until water leaks
| in. Maybe long enough to drag them out of the way; either to
| the sides of the channel or out of the water altogether.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they could just start pushing cargo containers overboard and
| fish them out until it 's light enough to move_
|
| Light boats are less stable. One of the few that could make
| this situation worse would be the damn thing capsizing.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Yes. Unloading is a science, also, if you want to avoid
| capsizing. And the risk is increased because they don't know
| on which sand the boat rests (it may be balanced at some
| point just by one bank + the pressure of the flow of water)
| and the tides add some random every 6 hrs.
| elihu wrote:
| The center of gravity on that ship looks like it could only
| be improved by chucking containers overboard. On the other
| hand, chucking them over the side one by one might be harder
| than just pushing a whole column over but making that kind of
| sudden weight change might not be good.
|
| I wonder what the options even are for removing the
| containers? I assume they're very securely strapped on most
| of the time, and maybe there's not any reasonable way to get
| any of the containers loose outside of a port without making
| the whole pile unstable.
| dshibarshin wrote:
| The carrier can announce a general average [1] which allows it
| to throw the containers overboard if they believe it will help
| the ship get moving.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_average
| jdasdf wrote:
| A general average requires an imminent danger which the ship
| is clearly no in, since it's just stuck.
|
| You also can't argue that they have to dump it overboard
| because of the costs that the delays will cause, because such
| costs are explicitly excluded in the 2004 rules on general
| averages [1]
|
| [1] Rule C, paragraph 3
| https://shippingandfreightresource.com/wp-
| content/uploads/20...
| wefgvcd wrote:
| I could not find a reference to imminent danger in Rule C.
| Could you please quote the passage you're referring to?
| jdasdf wrote:
| Rule C is about indirect damages.
|
| The iminent danger i refered to is rule A:
|
| >RULE A1.There is a general average act when, and only
| when, any extraordinary sacrifice or expenditure is
| intentionally and reasonably made or incurred for the
| common safety for the purpose of preserving from peril
| the property involved in a common maritime adventure.
|
| While imminent danger is not used, the rule itself can
| only be applied when the jettisoning of cargo is
| essential to the common safety. This most often happens
| when the vessel is in imminent danger of sinking and
| needs to shed weight.
|
| If the only way to get the ship unstuck from there were
| to jettison stuff out, and there were no way to otherwise
| free the ship (or safely unload the cargo) then maybe
| you'd be able to argue in favor of a general average, but
| given the circumstances that is not the case.
|
| The ship isn't exactly stuck in antartica, so safely
| unloading, although expensive, is an option that would
| preclude jettisoning (and therefore the general average)
| mongol wrote:
| They need to pump out sand from beneath the ship. If it is indeed
| sand.
| highspeedbus wrote:
| They could set up pumps to put water on the two spots where it is
| stuck, and at the same time pump out the water/sand mixture.
|
| This way it will increase the depth and width of the canal just
| where it is needed.
| richardfey wrote:
| I wonder whether it has had an impact on drugs price in the
| streets
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| Don't earthquakes cause liquefaction? Any possibility that you
| could introduce enough energy (possibly sound) in the correct
| frequency to make the sand act liquid enough that you could
| rotate the ship until it is free?
| kortex wrote:
| I was thinking the same. Get lots of pumps in, drill into the
| sand bar and pump water to fluidize it. But it's probably still
| a scale thing, all the proportions involved in this problem are
| ludicrous.
| Animats wrote:
| Smit Salvage's current plan is to dredge around the bow and pump
| out enough fuel to make the ship float higher.[1] More equipment
| will be brought in.
|
| [1] https://www.tellerreport.com/business/2021-03-26-the-
| dredgin...
| mallow wrote:
| solution: Honk the fog horn until the sand vibrates away from the
| sound.
| lebuffon wrote:
| This photo gives some perspective
|
| https://globalnews.ca/news/7719176/suez-canal-ship-digger-ex...
| hoseja wrote:
| The canal, for how important it is, sure hasn't seen much in the
| way of investment, it seems.
|
| They could have two lanes of concrete-lined canal I'm sure, but
| it's just a ditch with a tiny excavator.
| tim333 wrote:
| There has been some
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal#Bypass_expansion
|
| $9bn in 2014
| damontal wrote:
| Job interview question: how many helicopters would it take to
| lift it?
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| 15,000 Chinooks. Good luck finding that many, though.
| sn_master wrote:
| How about the Skycrane?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDQrUiCd61U
|
| Or Volvo trucks?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3yw4Qp8bX4
| jmpman wrote:
| Can they drive pilings on the edge of the canal, and attach
| cables from the pilings to the boat at various points? Seems like
| driving pilings is an operation which can be done in parallel,
| while unloading the containers is mostly serialized. I'm also
| assuming that wenches connected to pilings are able to pull
| harder than tug boats.
| sn_master wrote:
| You can even text now to get its status
|
| https://twitter.com/kelleyrobinson/status/137519912243366298...
| curmudgeon22 wrote:
| How does liability work in a situation like this? Can other
| shipping companies sue the at fault company for damages?
| Caligatio wrote:
| I assume the ship had a pilot from the canal authority which
| should absolve the shipping company from liability.
|
| There's another thread about a private sailboat transiting the
| canal and it mentioned several pilot changeovers; I have to
| imagine a giant container ship had something similar.
|
| Disclaimer: I know nearly nothing about the shipping/canal
| business.
| [deleted]
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| This thread reminds me similar threads here and elsewhere when
| Deep Water Horizon's well head was spewing hydrocarbons into the
| Gulf of Mexico for weeks. The immense scale (depth, pressure,
| etc) and logistics (distance from shore, open ocean) exceeds
| everyone's intuitive high-school grasp of physics. The ideas
| presented are laughable and immediately shot down by people armed
| with just a few facts (plenty again given the scale and logistics
| involved).
|
| I'm eager to see what clever solution the engineers eventually
| pick.
| gesman wrote:
| How about hard fixing heavy duty winches on the ship itself,
| attach the other end of cables to the shore and make the ship to
| pull itself in unstuck direction gradually?
| tilolebo wrote:
| The pandemic needs to stop ASAP so we can throw a Burning Man
| Middle East Edition next to that ship.
|
| Days of partying in the desert, opening random containers,
| driving little excavators. What a blast it would be!
| tim333 wrote:
| The covid regs in Egypt are pretty relaxed if you want to give
| it a go.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Comedy option, what wacky cold war era aircraft do we have
| capable of lifting massive loads like a container ship? Perhaps
| an enormous fleet of Chinook helicopters could take it straight
| up?
| eCa wrote:
| If I understand [1] properly, the Chinook can lift 13 tons[2].
|
| The Evergiven's maximum weight is 200000 tons. So that would be
| 15000+ Chinooks lifting it. A sight to behold.
|
| Added: Only about 1200 were ever produced, so that won't fly.
|
| [1]
| https://www.army.mil/article/137584/ch_47_chinook_helicopter
|
| [2] 26000 pounds
| nicbou wrote:
| Okay but what about rockets?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Someone call Elon!
| [deleted]
| eCa wrote:
| Well, according to[1] elsewhere in this thread, we can use
| 130 tons as an approximation for lift capacity. So for
| 200000 tons, that would require 1500 ICMBs connected to the
| ship and launched at the same time.
|
| Probably more expensive than most other solutions, and I
| doubt that the Evergiven will be in a good condition
| afterwards.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586189
| eCa wrote:
| Apparently I can't spell ICBM.
| gizmo385 wrote:
| I desperately want someone to photoshop this.
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| Perhaps mention it to Wren
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZsp1tgXkUI
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Oh what about magnetism? Could we wrap the ship in wire and
| send so much current through that it repels against the Earth's
| magnetic field and shoots itself right into the atmosphere?
| Basically building a giant rail gun. Might need a small nuclear
| power plant or two to make it feasible.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > Might need a small nuclear power plant or two to make it
| feasible.
|
| Amazingly, that's a severe underestimation.
|
| The force on a wire carrying current in a magnetic field is
| given by F = B*I*l, and to move it upwards that force needs
| to be at least equal to gravity, so equate to F = m*g.
|
| - Let's be generous and assume B = 100 uT = 100 * 10^-6 T.
|
| - Likewise, assume the ship is a rectangular box with sides
| of 400 m x 100 m, so a circumference of 1000 m, and that we
| can wrap a wire 100,000 times around it, to give total wire
| length l = 10^8 m.
|
| - m = 200,000 metric tonne = 2 * 10^8 kg (we assume magic
| wire that is massless).
|
| - g = 10 m/s^2.
|
| Solving for I yields I = mg/Bl = 2 * 10^5 A. That's a lot of
| current.
|
| If we assume the wire has a diameter of 10 cm (which is
| ridiculously high considering we just wrapped it 100,000
| times around the ship, but whatever) and is made out of
| copper, it has a resistance of ~200 Ohms. Necessary power to
| generate such a current is P = I^2*R = 8*10^12 W (= 8000 TW).
| That's about half the total energy consumption of humanity.
|
| The largest nuclear power plant puts out about 8000 MW, so
| you'd need a 1000 of them.
| _Microft wrote:
| The most important thing here is the magicness of the wire.
| The ship is 60m wide and 30m tall, that makes a
| circumference of 180m. 0.05m radius, 100000 windings, made
| of copper with a density of approx. 8900kg/m^3 gives a
| total mass of approx. 1.3*10^6 tons for the cable alone.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Yeah, the wire would be heavier than the ship.
|
| That is a relatively fundamental result. With current
| materials, it's pretty much impossible to levitate
| anything against Earth's magnetic field. You can't put
| enough current through a wire to create a force bigger
| than its own gravity without using unreasonable amounts
| of power. Even if you put in that power, you'd melt the
| wire.
| nullsense wrote:
| Why don't we just melt the ship? If we turn the whole
| thing into a liquid it could flow down the canal.
| [deleted]
| pedrig wrote:
| Discussions like these are why I love HN. Sorry for non-
| constructive response, but this time I just had to say it.
| Great laugh.
| dghughes wrote:
| Add another 40,000 tonnes for the empty containers, then
| probably that again for whatever is in them. Plus probably
| another 10,000 tonnes for fuel.
|
| Really it may be conservative to say another 100,000 tonnes
| for all the stuff other than the 200,000 tonnes of the ship
| itself.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| The 200,000 metric tonne figure was derived from the
| deadweight tonnage, which is the weight of fuel and cargo
| a ship can carry, but excludes the weight of the empty
| ship itself. Wikipedia doesn't list displacement (which
| is weight of the ship plus cargo) for the Ever Given, but
| empty weight of modern container ships is on the order of
| 10% of their capacity, so ignoring the ships empty weight
| isn't the worst approximation used.
| etxm wrote:
| So why are you spending all your time gabbing. Get to work!
| gabagool wrote:
| okay, got it. So that's totally infeasible. what if we
| "only" had to fire it into the nearby Suez Gulf?
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| This calculation only gives the amount of power needed to
| cancel gravity. It's the minimum power needed to move it
| up, even if that's just a millimeter.
|
| If you actually want to accelerate it upward to any
| meaningful speed, you'd need even more power.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Well, on the bright side once we free it with this
| incredible contraption then we've also solved all of
| humanity's power needs for a few more centuries. :)
| rogerdickey wrote:
| Upvoting you just due to username
| stordoff wrote:
| I've now got the most amazing image in my head of a container
| ship being fired at the moon.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Hah or if we reverse the polarity maybe we can crush it
| into something the size of an aluminum can.
| nicbou wrote:
| What about using a really, really long lever?
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Hah that would be incredible. Build something so long that a
| small child in China steps on it and _WHOOSH_ out goes the
| ship thousands and thousands of miles away! We 'll use the
| peak of Mt. Everest as the fulcrum!
| IgorPartola wrote:
| With levers you trade force for time. How long would a
| lever like that take to complete its arc?
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Assume the lever is steel.
|
| The speed of sound in steel is approx. 10,000 ft/s.
|
| The distance from Suez to Beijing is approx. 25,000,000
| feet.
|
| The time for a force to be applied in Beijing and a
| reaction in Suez would be ~2,500 seconds - or 1.7 days.
| elihu wrote:
| Even more whimsical option: Evangelion is set in 2015, which
| means if we were following their projected technology timeline,
| we could just unload the ship by Eva. Probably unit 0, because
| Rei tends to get the crappy jobs. Not Asuka, she'd turn it into
| a contest of who could sink the most tugboats by throwing
| containers at them or something like that.
|
| The Evas can be airlifted anywhere in the world, but IIRC they
| have about five minutes of battery power. So, the biggest
| logistical problem would be getting suitable power on site.
| What are the voltage/current/frequency requirements of an Eva
| charger? How many months/years would it take to charge an Eva
| with a J1772 port or whatever they use in that part of the
| world? Looks like the nearest Tesla superchargers are in Israel
| and Jordan, which is too far even if they were compatible.
| Maybe NERV has a mobile generator?
|
| The Jet Alone folks could put in a competing bid, but their
| robot would just get sabotaged again.
| andygates wrote:
| This looks like a job for demilitarised Jaegers.
| tzs wrote:
| The best comedy approach is to hire Planet Express to fly in a
| giant can of WD-40. That stuff will get anything unstuck.
| nullsense wrote:
| Seriously underrated idea.
| afarrell wrote:
| An entire fleet of Chinook helecopters would blow a mighty
| draft of air downward onto the ship, holding it in place.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Not a chance. 224,000 _tons_. But you could use those to lift
| containers off one-by-one. Then you still have to move the ship
| but maybe when it is unloaded it can be done.
| neartheplain wrote:
| Better Cold War option:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
|
| The ship's a total loss, but Egypt also gets a new lake!
| HPsquared wrote:
| Those passing through the area afterwards might not like that
| idea.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| You know there's probably someone doing the cost-benefit
| analysis right now to see if just digging a new canal channel
| around the ship would be faster and cheaper than removing it.
| neartheplain wrote:
| Why dig when you can blast?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Chagan
| mark_mart wrote:
| I see you like to blast things hah. That canal was built
| in 10 years.
| nullsense wrote:
| Peter Thiel would ask "ok, but how would build it in 6
| months?"
| 205guy wrote:
| The canal expansion in 2014 was actually completed in one
| year:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Area_Development
| _Pr...
| [deleted]
| Philadelphia wrote:
| Just use the Philadelphia Experiment technology to teleport it
| to another dimension
| salawat wrote:
| Now that's an idea I can get behind, but unfortunately, the
| guy with classification authority over that material didn't
| write down where it was eventually stored...
|
| In fact we can't find him anywhere...
| a_t48 wrote:
| Just attach some thrusters to the dang thing and we are good -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPg4JP1WzQc
| munk-a wrote:
| I'd be amazed if the density of weight on the ship is such that
| an arbitrarily large fleet of Chinooks could actually safely
| accomplish this. And helicopters flying in a dense formation
| under strain is quite likely to result in a lot of really big
| problems.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| The rotor wash beneath it all would be breathtaking.. and
| might blow all the water out of the canal. :)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Which makes me think - what about using all these choppers
| to blow the water _in_ - and keep it there? :).
|
| (I assume this is an equivalent problem to the lifting
| problem, as the extra pressure they'd be fighting would be
| that of the ship displacing water.)
| munk-a wrote:
| That's actually an interesting idea - set up a temporary
| lock/dam on either side of the ship to float it. If,
| instead of a boring dam made out of concrete or something
| "normal" we used a fleet of Chinooks then all the better!
|
| I do believe this is probably one of the solutions that's
| being investigated but I also believe it's
|
| 1. Super expensive to construct an impromptu dam under
| water
|
| 2. Floating a listing ship can result in more severe
| listing if you're not careful (See, for instance, the
| fact that when a ship beaches itself while the tide is
| out it's initially bad news - and when the tide starts to
| come back in it becomes significantly worse news.
|
| Learning and humor are fun together!
| munk-a wrote:
| Somebody get Randall Munroe on the phone - I think we've
| found the next What-If topic.
| smegger001 wrote:
| Yeah because what we really need to fix this situation is
| several hundred giant blenders exploding in mid air fireball
| of high velocity steel on top of the jammed ship
| kuzko_topia wrote:
| Absolutely glorious, though I'm wondering what recent
| synced drones could do for that instead of faking
| foreworks.
| Izkata wrote:
| Now I wonder...
|
| Let's assume it was possible. Would the force of lifting that
| much mass be enough to shift the earth in a measurable way?
| (I'm assuming it would be a lot stronger lifting it into the
| air than what floating on the water produces, but have no
| idea what the math would be)
| lisper wrote:
| F=ma no matter what, so if things aren't accelerating, the
| force isn't changing, it's just being transferred to the
| earth by other means. In this case, it would be through the
| air rather than the water.
| Izkata wrote:
| It is as it's lifted though, right?
| lisper wrote:
| I don't understand the question. Try restating the
| question without using the word "it".
| Izkata wrote:
| The ship is accelerating as it's lifted though, right?
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, but the ship is _already_ being accelerated upwards
| by the surface of the earth at 9.8 m /s^2. If you were to
| lift it, you'd do it very, very slowly, so you'd increase
| the acceleration (temporarily) to, say, 9.8000001 m/s^2.
| The extra force required to do that is very small.
|
| Note that ships actually _are_ accelerated up and down in
| the Panama canal, which has locks. (The Suez doesn 't.)
| That amounts to pretty much the same thing. It doesn't
| matter whether the forces are transferred to the earth
| via a column of water or a column of air.
| [deleted]
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| It has a 20,000 container capacity, so if it's full and you
| could unload them at a rate of 1 per minute (assuming multiple
| choppers) it would take 2 weeks with no stopping, but I assume
| the frequency would be much lower than that so you're talking
| possibly months to unload even a fraction of them.
| josiahq wrote:
| Yeah, from the middle out.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Someone grab a whiteboard...
| munk-a wrote:
| Also - it's quite possible it'd further beach itself during
| the unloading unless you replaced the mass in an easily
| removable manner... To which end I'd like to suggest self-
| launching lead trebuchets.
| sverhagen wrote:
| I understand this is all not realistic, but since we're
| just spitballing here, before I realized how many
| containers we're even talking about here, I had rather
| wondered if lifting off a lesser number of containers in
| the right place would be exactly right to shift the
| weight/balance for the ship to get unstuck.
| munk-a wrote:
| That might be the case - also, just for the serious - a
| less silly recommendation. This is what ballast does
| (sorta) and replacing the containers with water (i.e. in
| inflatable reservoirs) that can quickly be pumped out
| might be a reasonable way to Inidiana Jones your way into
| tricking the rolling boulder and/or listing vessel.
| leesec wrote:
| Not even close. This ship is absolutely giant.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Hrm change of plans, let's pull a few ICBMs out and set them
| up on each corner with massive tow lines. We'll get it out
| the way in an instant... and into low earth orbit minutes
| later!
| garaetjjte wrote:
| ICBMs won't do it, we need something stronger.
|
| I cannot find how much ship weights itself, but deadweight
| tonnage which is about 200000t. Let's assume 300000t.
| Thrust of Saturn V S-IC stage is 3300t, with diameter of
| 10m, empty mass of 130t and 2150t of propellant for 150s
| burn time. It would need nearly 300 fully fuelled S-IC
| stages to lift it! Which is a bit too much, as with 400x60m
| ship area we can only fit about 240 stages. But as we're
| _definitely_ not going into orbit anyway we can reduce
| propellant amount for shorter burn time. Cutting propellant
| by half reducing burn time to 75s we only need around 143
| stages, fitting on ship with room to spare.
|
| So in that regard it is doable. But there's problem of what
| to do with all the exhaust, as rockets obviously aren't
| designed for pulling load attached to the bottom...
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| We'll dig down beneath the ship hundreds and hundreds of
| feet to build the rocket from below, with huge exhaust
| shafts to let the pressure exit.
| rogerdickey wrote:
| What about setting off a nuclear bomb underneath the
| ship?
| WJW wrote:
| Ya no. An ICBM like the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-65_Atlas has a launch
| thrust of only 1,300 kN, or about 130 tons. That would lift
| about 4 of the 20000 containers aboard.
| lstodd wrote:
| Forget it.
|
| Let's just nuke it, them nuclear weapons have to be
| disposed of somehow, and the channel needs some expansion,
| it seems.
| smegger001 wrote:
| well lets just dig out the old mothballed project
| plowshare out of the coldwar toolbox and see what we can
| do.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
| pjc50 wrote:
| If I've done the maths right, you need a force of two
| billion Newton to lift it, and even if you round up a
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman to 1MN you
| still need two thousand of them. ICBMs are not that big.
|
| Use musk's starship and you need >166 of them...
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Drat, we never should have given up on nuclear powered
| rocket engines in the 50s!
| [deleted]
| a9h74j wrote:
| Kessler has entered the chat.
| dharmab wrote:
| The Mil V-12 was built to lift ICBMs, and could easily lift any
| container.
|
| https://youtu.be/yOApFeEgHcE
| erulabs wrote:
| (200,000 short tons) / (130,000 pounds lifting capacity) =
| 3,076 Spruce... Geese.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| I'm imagining an incredible system of hooks setup so that the
| fleet of Spruce Gooses pass over at low altitude and speed,
| snare the hooks, and _YOINK_ pull it right out in one pass.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's been done.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-
| air_recovery...
| elihu wrote:
| Maybe supplement the Chinooks with V-22 Ospreys and Harriers?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Not enough of them in the world.
|
| This thing is truly massive.
| tejado wrote:
| Can you implement an API for that? ;)
| lovemenot wrote:
| Eureka! Make the water sufficiently dense by dissolving salt or
| another chemical into it. And/or chilling it.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Can someone here run the numbers on coating the whole thing in a
| half inch of peanut butter and unleashing an army of hungry
| squirrels to eat their way through? I'm not saying it's the
| perfect solution, but it's the best shot we've got.
| davidw wrote:
| I guess it's pretty complicated, but if it were less stuck, I
| wonder if they could use the anchors to winch it out of the
| tricky spot it's in. Use a tug to drop one on the other side of
| the canal, then pull it in to move the boat sideways.
| agrajag wrote:
| You're breaking the anchor chain or housing in that case. The
| problem with just trying to pull the thing out is it's
| extremely likely to cause a leak and then becomes even harder
| to move.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Anybody know at what point the backed up ships start taking the
| long way around? (Around Africa!)
| bertmuthalaly wrote:
| It might be already happening?
| https://twitter.com/AriaCallaghan/status/1375154205233721348
| donaldo wrote:
| Wow, didn't know it was stuck horizontally. Hope they can fix it.
| [deleted]
| cghendrix wrote:
| Wonder how the data for the actual position of the ship is
| obtained or if it's estimated and just hard coded on to the map?
|
| I always love sites that are question in the domain with answers
| in the webpage as the main content.
| samizdis wrote:
| You can see it here: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. I notice that the two Maersk freighters behind the Ever
| Given are no longer there. It looks like all traffic has been
| cleared from the canal on both sides. Zoom out. The north end
| of the Gulf of Suez looks like a parking lot. So does the Med
| north of Port Said. So does Fayed, the lake in the middle of
| the canal.
|
| Smit, the big Dutch salvage firm, has been called in and
| already has their first heavy equipment, a dredger, on site.
| "Days to weeks" is all they'll say. The good case is that
| they pump fuel and ballast water out of the ship, plus some
| dredging, and it floats free. The not so good case is they
| bring in a big crane and start unloading containers. The bad
| case is that the ship is partly sunk and will have to be
| patched and refloated. The really bad case is that the hull
| is so badly damaged that the ship has to be cut apart in
| place.
|
| Meanwhile, shipping from China to Europe is now US$4000/TEU.
| Usually it's around US$1000. China's "Belt and Road" rail
| plan may pay off.
| jtbayly wrote:
| > China's "Belt and Road" rail plan may pay off.
|
| That's great conspiracy theory fodder right there. :)
|
| Edit: perhaps it's not so far fetched, if the boat drew a
| giant penis before getting stuck.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Removing ballast from a ship with such a heavy top load is
| _super_ risky. That could turn 'days or weeks' into
| 'months or years'.
| stragies wrote:
| Or the super-extra-bad case: The ship breaks while
| attempting to pull it free. Pieces of ship + 20000
| containers in the canal. How long would it be blocked for.
| Full-spectrum catastrophe!
| laurent92 wrote:
| How far could it go? Could it go political about Egypt's
| management of the crisis?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...
|
| See the "Broadcast information" section.
|
| Position, heading, speed, unique ID, etc. are all broadcast
| "every 2 to 10 seconds".
| [deleted]
| lacker wrote:
| I know very little about boat data but I was also curious; it
| looks like it is using Vesselfinder which in turn uses data
| from this AIS system.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...
|
| There is as much information as a normal human could want to
| know about how ship location data is tracked ;-)
| onedognight wrote:
| On iOS you can use Vessel Finder Pro. It provides a real-time
| world map of all (for some reasonable definition of all) ships.
| Most of maps views I have seen of this ship are just screen
| shots from this app. I paid the $10 just to confirm this fact
| yesterday as Ship Finder, my old standby, didn't have it.
| munk-a wrote:
| This is one particular outlet[1] for that data but, AFAIK, all
| modern commercial vessels continuously report their location
| via satellite or, preferably, coastal AIS. That data is
| collected by something then APIs happen along with aggregation
| and probably more APIs and... after all that, the data is
| pretty widely available.
|
| Ship location isn't considered privileged security information
| which was a bit surprising to me since pirates are still a
| thing, but yea - that's the state of the world.
|
| Edit: Apparently I forgot to include the link, here it is:
|
| 1.
| https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:32.5/cente...
| WJW wrote:
| It's super useful to know the location, speed and course of
| other vessels nearby for navigational purposes. For those few
| regions where piracy is a serious issue, vessels are either
| escorted by navy ships in convoys, arrange private security
| contractors or turn off AIS. The benefits of hiding yourself
| don't outweigh the downsides though, especially not in
| "civilized" oceans.
| laurent92 wrote:
| > isn't considered privileged information
|
| Not only that, but Bloomberg terminals have the ship
| locations in real time because it impacts trading a lot:
| Petrol, ore, cereals, etc.
| cricalix wrote:
| As a small vessel (10 metres) owner and operator, it's quite
| nice that AIS operates over VHF. I can install an AIS
| receiver and see precisely what's coming my way, and the
| instrumentation available to me can predict whether I might
| collide with the ship, or if I'll pass ahead/behind (I prefer
| behind). Useful in the dark when distance is hard to gauge.
|
| Saw on twitter the other day that one vessel going past the
| east coast of Africa had changed their info field
| (destination I think) to "ARMED GUARD ONBOARD"..
| bmurray7jhu wrote:
| Twitter link:
|
| https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1374803809696817154
| cricalix wrote:
| VesselFinder and MarineTraffic use the data broadcast by
| vessels on AIS[0]. The AIS devices can be programmed with the
| dimensions of the vessel, location of the AIS GPS antenna
| relative to the vessel (ie, is it right aft, or in the middle,
| etcetera), and uses sensor data from the network bus to get
| direction, speed and the like. So yeah, if the ship's AIS is
| saying "I'm at latitude, longitude doing 0 knots, last reported
| course was 73 degrees", the websites can generate a somewhat
| accurate picture.
|
| 0:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...
| cgdub wrote:
| A single canal is a single point of failure. We need to have
| multiple canals to handle unexpected failures.
| cr1895 wrote:
| Well, you can always sail around.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| A balloon half a kilometer in radius filled with hydrogen should
| be able to float the ship.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| How would you acquire that much hydrogen, and how much would it
| cost?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Hydrogen is cheap; That's only about $42M at today's prices.
|
| If it wasn't clear the whole "lift it with a balloon" thing
| was a joke though
| bruiseralmighty wrote:
| People on here pretending they are going to move the ship with
| all the liability and competing cargo claims.
|
| In 3 months that ship will still be there and they will have dug
| a new divert to move the canal around it.
|
| With modern methods and tools they could probably divert a 3 mile
| section of the canal in less time than it would take to move this
| ship and its cargo.
| edub wrote:
| This is an awful amount of weight to be moved. But one thing it
| has going is that all of the weight is on a vessel that is
| designed to float. We have canal locks that can lift ships this
| size.
|
| So my crazy idea is to build a reverse cofferdam around the ship
| with Larssen steel pilings and pump water into it until the ship
| floats and straighten the ship and remove the pilings.
| lurquer wrote:
| My prediction:
|
| The ship isn't going anywhere. It will need to be disassembled.
| jaza wrote:
| It's probably gonna be stuck for a while. I'd suggest that all
| other ships get started on the scenic detour. Set course for Cape
| of Good Hope.
| zepearl wrote:
| Earlier today By clicking on some "dots" queued up on that map I
| think that I saw a ship tagged to transport "livestock" => that
| might become a small tragedy if they don't manage to clear
| quickly the channel - those chicken/goats/dont_know_what might be
| due to die anyway once they reach their destination, but dying of
| hunger/thirst packed aboard a ship might be worse... :(
| [deleted]
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| Apparently the Suez shaves off 3 days of travel time and saves
| $360,000 of fuel.
|
| If we're talking weeks to get unstuck, they better head around
| the tip of Africa.
| [deleted]
| superjan wrote:
| Who designed this critical piece of infrastructure with a single
| point of failure?
| tim333 wrote:
| It's kind of evolved starting from the ancient canals of 500 BC
| or so. They've upgraded some of it to 2 parallel channels but
| not the bit the Ever Given is stuck in yet unfortunately.
| maury91 wrote:
| You are all missing the simple solution: construct another canal
| next to it, so the other ships can continue to pass.
|
| ( I'm joking, do not take this as a serious solution )
| tomerv wrote:
| I actually don't understand why this isn't the best option
| right now. The east bank is mostly empty, and the channel is
| pretty shallow. You could probably construct a 1km detour
| within a few weeks with relatively low cost. Seems like a good
| way to hedge the bet of getting it unstuck.
| DonCopal wrote:
| > within a few weeks
|
| Haha, no. Just no.
| intrasight wrote:
| The movie rights should pay for some of the salvage costs
| beams wrote:
| Is it strange to anyone that we load ships to this capacity? Is
| this the standard procedure?
|
| I'm essentially wondering why this is more cost-effective than
| building more, smaller ships.
| Caligatio wrote:
| If you can guarantee that the ship can be routinely filled to
| capacity, it's almost always economical to build the biggest
| ship you can. These things are often built to the maximum size
| that will fit into the canal that they transit.
|
| I thought I remember reading that this ship was designed to
| meet the Suez canal specs.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _It has cost us $30 billion dollars, so far..._
|
| This valuation is based on Lloyd's list's valuation of Suez
| traffic at ~$10 billion / day, but surely that would require all
| traffic to be permanently lost (rather than delayed) to add up to
| a concrete loss. Spoilage might be an issue with some cargo, plus
| there's other costs to delay, but I can't imagine the eventual
| loss will be anything close to $10 billion / day (excepting
| obvious large unknowns like market speculation).
| kyberias wrote:
| Has anyone called Elon Musk yet?
| hadora wrote:
| i had to create an account to say that you made me chuckle.
| Thank you very much
| acd10j wrote:
| Some of the news stories like this:
| https://nypost.com/2021/03/24/giant-container-ship-blocking-...
| are claiming that ship is partially free, what does it mean ? I
| am confused ....
| tim333 wrote:
| I think there were some false reports. It's still stuck.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| I'd like to understand why this hasn't happened before. What was
| special about this ship, this passage, etc.?
| markvdb wrote:
| Build a bypass in the empty desert to the east of where the ship
| is stranded.
|
| Deal with getting this ship unstuck in parallel.
| tim333 wrote:
| Might take a while.
| etxm wrote:
| You can also text for status: (586) 800-BOAT
|
| https://twitter.com/kelleyrobinson/status/137519912243366298...
| barbegal wrote:
| It will be weeks before this ship is free.
|
| Fuel and oil can be pumped out but that only makes up a fraction
| of the total weight of the vessel. Containers can be unloaded but
| again the lightest will be at the top so a significant number
| will need to be removed to make a big enough difference. And
| unloading them will be a slow process. You can maybe unload a few
| per hour with helicopters. There doesn't exist any infrastructure
| which could get to that location and lift off containers. You
| could build a custom crane barge but that would take at least a
| month to fabricate and get to the site. The easiest way to remove
| containers will be using cutting equipment, winches and possibly
| explosives. It won't be easy and will likely take several weeks
| to unload a significant number of containers, the ship and
| containers will be damaged in the process.
|
| That leaves dredging the sand under the ship. Again the
| infrastructure to do this rapidly doesn't exist. You can dig out
| the sand around the ship but there is a huge amount that the ship
| is resting on. It will take specialist dredging equipment to
| start removing this sand.
| rocqua wrote:
| Could you replace dredging with just a whole lot of flowing
| water? Pump water under the hull, let the sand turn into mud,
| have the weight of the ship push the mud to the side. As the
| ship gets lower and lower, less of its weight becomes supported
| by the sand.
|
| The mud would still flow to the sides. You might wanna do some
| dredging over there to give the mud somewhere to go, and make
| more manouvring space. But in any case, this way you can move a
| whole lot of sand with very basic equipment. You can't move it
| far, or move it "up" but you can move it.
| mark_mart wrote:
| Should we also count the effort needed to put these containers
| back to vessel? Same for fuel.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| No. The blockage is the problem; anything on that ship is
| basically irrelevant from an economical perspective.
| Especially when we're talking about weeks of downtime.
| brian_cloutier wrote:
| Who internalizes those costs though?
|
| Only the owner of the ship is allowed to harm it and the
| owner would like the cargo to remain undamaged. I suppose
| the many other entities which would like to use the canal
| could pay the owner enough to make damaging the ship and
| cargo economical?
|
| Egypt might be able to unilaterally decide to destroy the
| ship but I don't know how much benefit Egypt gets from
| keeping the canal open, they might not have a strong
| incentive either way.
|
| I agree with you that collectively we should be able to say
| the safety of the ship is unimportant compared to all the
| other cargo which needs to get through that canal. However,
| 2020 should have made it clear that we're not good at
| solving that kind of coordination problem.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| I feel like theres a lot of international and maritime
| laws Egypt would violate if they just decide to blow the
| cargo ship without consent from all parties. This would
| make further trade relations with anyone... sour?
| _ph_ wrote:
| Trade relations with the country which controls the Suez
| canal? I would guess no nation depending on international
| trade would rather have the canal free. So no one would
| blame Egypt, if they decided to blow up the ship.
|
| However, blowing up the ship is likely to create a even
| bigger mess, so that is the biggest reason that it is
| still there.
| the8472 wrote:
| > Again the infrastructure to do this rapidly doesn't exist.
|
| The UAE used several sand-vacuuming ships to build their
| artificial islands, wouldn't those do the job?
| float4 wrote:
| The dredging for that project was done by a Belgian and a
| Dutch company, and I don't think they left their ships and
| equipment there afterwards.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| That Dutch company has now been called in to fix this,
| though.
| sn_master wrote:
| That company is the same one that raised the Kursk!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQJ6IMREvz8
| tifadg1 wrote:
| What a fascinating watch. To think this was possible in
| 2001, I wonder how the capabilities have improved since.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It also took many years.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The excavators make sense as the first stage of a dredging
| operation.
| xixixao wrote:
| Why not roll the containers off the ship - like a stone block
| of a pyramid? "All you need" is a ramp (or a hole in the side).
| adenozine wrote:
| Some of the containers are upwards of 10t in weight. It's a
| good idea, but it's not feasible because of how slowly a ramp
| structure capable of holding that much could be deployed.
| yoaviram wrote:
| How about sectioning off a part of the canal around the ship
| and pumping water in?
| ant6n wrote:
| That sounds so crazy, it might just work. One would need to
| build a wall, possibly out of sand, around the ship,
| including blocking off the suez Canal itself at two spots.
|
| It'sa bit like that Ceasar built two rings of walls when he
| was besieging the Gauls but was in turn besieged by the Gaul
| relief army, greatly and suspencefully explained in this
| video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SU1Ej9Yqt68
| tim333 wrote:
| They may have a shot Mar 30th - there's a high tide coming.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| How about doing nothing? Just let the canal be blocked. Go the
| long way. All about the journey not thw destination. Give the
| container owners an NFT of their missing container.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Wait for sea-level rise to do the work. According to some, it
| won't be more than twelve years for 3m rise.
|
| Edward Teller: How big is Antarctica?
| cycomanic wrote:
| Reading through the comments where people come up with solutions,
| really shows to me that software engineering education is lacking
| in terms of teaching general engineering principles.
|
| Some of these proposals can be seen as being completely off
| reality by some basic order of magnitude estimations. Which is
| something that should be front and center of every engineering
| education.
| ecf wrote:
| > really shows to me that software engineering education is
| lacking in terms of teaching general engineering principles
|
| Correct me if I'm wrong but Hacker News isn't comprised solely
| of software engineers.
| cycomanic wrote:
| You are obviously correct (I'm not one myself), but I would
| suspect that we have a disproportionately high number of them
| compared to other type of engineers.
| kergonath wrote:
| I wonder how expensive and complicated it would be to let it
| there and dig another lane to bypass it.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Very - there's another thread discussing this. Big ships need a
| lot of room to turn, so the bypass lane would need to be really
| long.
| bruiseralmighty wrote:
| I believe this will be the option they take. Not sure how else
| they plan to clear the canal of obstacles if the Ever Given
| ends up capsizing and spilling its cargo.
|
| At that point, you may as well have begun digging a new canal
| anyways.
| imtringued wrote:
| If you can dig a whole lane why not dig the current one out?
| ksec wrote:
| ~15% of the World's trade is dependent on it and this is taking
| much longer than expected. Why?
| vkou wrote:
| Because your expectations were far too high.
| zokier wrote:
| Much longer than expected by whom? Have you seen some scenario
| planning documentation by canal authorities or others for this
| sort of situation? Or what are you basing you claim on?
| yuliyp wrote:
| So yes it affects a lot of trade. But it can be worked around.
| Ships can sail around Africa or goods can be shipped across the
| Pacific and across the Panama Canal or via rail across America.
| Obviously those are more expensive, but the goods will still be
| transported.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Is this taking longer than expected?
| ksm1717 wrote:
| For real. Why haven't they just mobilized hacker news?
| gizmo385 wrote:
| "We should take the ship, AND PUSH IT SOMEWHERE ELSE" :D [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0sTNLdNhuE
| ksm1717 wrote:
| You can trust that I don't need to follow that link,
| brother.
| [deleted]
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Extrapolating from the 2014 extensions, building a 2nd backup
| canal would cost >$8B.
|
| Considering it earns $10B/year to Egypt, I don't know if this
| short downtime will justify the cost to them.
| kergonath wrote:
| It is costing much more than that to shipping companies and
| the broader industry. If that is an option, I am sure they'll
| find the money. That probably would take much longer than un-
| sticking the ship, assuming this is possible.
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| Because it's hard
| londons_explore wrote:
| Just dig a new canal around the ship?
|
| A quarter mile diversion can't take that long to dig. The
| whole canal is 120 miles, so an extra quarter mile they
| should be able to dig in a few days I would think?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Sounds easier to just dig through the ship.
| pjc50 wrote:
| This man doesn't infrastructure.
|
| (If you think it's that easy, pop over and ask if you can
| have a go on the JCB)
| londons_explore wrote:
| I actually spent a few weeks of my life driving a JCB
| commercially...
| phkahler wrote:
| "Just" widen the canal so it can continue pivoting around
| the most stuck end until its straight again.
| azornathogron wrote:
| > The whole canal is 120 miles, so an extra quarter mile
| they should be able to dig in a few days I would think?
|
| Uh, what? Why would the length of the canal as a whole tell
| you anything about how long digging a quarter-mile section
| would take? If the canal as a whole was longer or shorter,
| would that somehow change your estimate?
| gm3dmo wrote:
| Just get people who know what they are doing to sort it
| out.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Yes it would... I know the suez canal was a once-per-
| century type infrastructure investment for Egypt. Doing
| that same investment again probbaly isn't feasible. But
| doing 0.2% of the work again is starting to sound pretty
| affordable...
| pjc50 wrote:
| > suez canal was a once-per-century type infrastructure
| investment for Egypt.
|
| Once-per-century investment for _France_. It was, like
| the Eurotunnel, nominally privately funded:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Company but with
| significant political cover.
| LegitShady wrote:
| "Quarter mile" is a linear dimension. What is the width?
|
| If you had to estimate the volume of earth in that 'quarter
| mile', and then estimate the size of an excavator bucket,
| and the capacity of a dump truck, and the availability of
| all those things at any given time (even if you ship them
| in), you'd soon realize that just digging out that earth
| will take more time.
|
| On top of that, there's going to be FLOW in the canal -
| what will your diversion to for erosion, pressure on the
| locks, etc.
|
| You risk damaging the canal itself to deal with a temporary
| problem if you think you can just 'dig around it' in 5
| days. My bet is you've never seen how long it takes to plan
| something with this much risk involved.
|
| This isn't software, you aren't going to Agile it away if
| you screw it up.
| [deleted]
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Volume is ^3 of the linear size. To get a clear picture of
| how much it is do this:
|
| - launch minecraft in creative mode and make 40x40 pad of
| steel blocks, 1 block high. You should do it in a few
| minutes.
|
| - now do a 40x40x40 cube. Good luck for the rest of your
| day.
| ben509 wrote:
| You're swapping moving a mostly hollow ship with containers
| for moving a far larger volume of solid earth.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Lol no
| gizmo385 wrote:
| This sounds eerily similar to "Just add the new feature, it
| can't take that long". Things are complicated.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I mean it is just typing... how hard can it be?
| dekhn wrote:
| because it's "cheaper" to build a SPOF and then handle the
| exceptions when they come.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Ship is no longer on the happy path.
| panzagl wrote:
| It's stuck like a couch in a stairwell.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Pivot!
| RantyDave wrote:
| Except it's a couch with a bulbous bow that got buried into
| the side of the stairwell, which just happens to be made of
| clay. I assume the stern is stuck, too.
|
| And all you have to remove it is a pin. So, this is going to
| take a while.
| dkarl wrote:
| Oh, dear. Time travelers really ought to be more careful.
| phkahler wrote:
| Yeah, they forgot their towel.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Do you think getting David Schwimmer to come yell "Pivot!"
| would help?
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Because it's, you know, stuck. If they accidentally sink it,
| the cleanup will be even more messy.
| RantyDave wrote:
| I think it would be very, very difficult to sink. Quite aside
| from the (hopefully) large number of bulkheads and other such
| safety measures, the ship will be close to maximum draft for
| the canal and as such would only be able to sink a metre or
| two anyway. True, you'd then need to refloat it in situ,
| which would not be fun ... and it would probably just become
| more stuck rather than less.
|
| I think it's just going to take time and lots of digging.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Yes, it probably wouldn't irreparably sink or something
| like that. Still, specialized recovery work would take even
| more time. Not to mention the possibility of containers
| falling down.
|
| Best to take it slow and steady.
| gm3dmo wrote:
| Suez canal is 24 meters deep. i count 9 iso containers
| stacked high on the deck (an iso container is 2.59m high).
|
| Smit will be making bank on this.
| blhack wrote:
| One of the largest ships in the world has run aground. How long
| did you expect it would take to salvage it?
| nabla9 wrote:
| ~30% of World container traffic goes trough it.
|
| Many bulk carriers exceed Suezmax limits and can't go trough.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| My question, for those who know more about this domain than me,
| is this a problem that enough money could fix? If the
| governments of the world wrote a $1 trillion blank check, would
| that be enough to get the ship out in the next 24 hours?
|
| Or is this a problem that money alone can't solve?
| _ph_ wrote:
| Money can do very little here. The problem is, the solution
| probably requires rather heavy equipment. Like floating
| cranes to unload the containers or giant excavators. This
| equipment exists and the costs for doing the operations would
| be miniscule compared to the costs of the blocked channel.
| But the problem is moving such equipment to Egypt. These
| floating cranes might be in the Netherlands right now and the
| only way to get them to Suez is to drive them there at
| perhaps 20kph. So it could take like 2 weeks at minimum to
| get the equipment there. This is a very fundamental problem.
| Transport by road or railroad still would take like a week
| but is limited to things which are not much larger than
| containers and the maximum weight a helicopter can lift is
| like 10 tons. The largest aircraft can lift over 300 tons but
| only as long as the freight fits into the aircraft. Oh, and
| there is only one of it :p. So anything larger has to
| literally shipped to the location. The only good news is, the
| site is reachable by oceangoing vessels :)
|
| So there are two fundamental challenges:
|
| - come up with a good plan how to get the ship out of there
|
| - transport the necessary equipment quickly to the site. This
| step can easily take weeks.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Let the answers to your question be a caution to all the Musk
| and Star Trek fans around here: like this ship, not matter
| how much money you throw at mars terra-forming, FTL drives
| and climate change reversal or control technology some things
| have non-negotiable deadlines.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| There is a limited number of people that have the expertise,
| and equipment to pull it off, and it takes them time even if
| they had been standing by at the accident site. Money isn't
| the issue right now. I'm a mariner, but not a salvage law
| expert, but the ship and the cargo on it are effectively the
| collateral for whoever removes this thing, so money is likely
| not an issue.
|
| This is now an engineering and logisitics problem. What is
| necessary for the ship to be floating again? And what
| equipment is needed for that to happen? If it isn't already
| at hand, how can they get the equipment there (there is
| navigable water nearby, but there may be no way to unload
| heavy equipment onto the land).
| cricalix wrote:
| We're discussing a ship that is 400 metres long, 59 metres
| wide, and has a draft of 16 metres[0]. It's carrying
| somewhere over 18,000 containers, each of which could weight
| up to 27,000 kg[1]. It's unlikely that all of them weigh that
| much, but still, they can be heavy.
|
| The load has been very carefully placed on the ship to ensure
| maximum stability. So the heavy loads are probably deeper in
| the hull and the lighter loads are higher up. When ships get
| unloaded in port, it's unlikely that all the containers are
| for that port, so an intricate dance starts - offloading some
| containers, moving other ones to maintain the balance, and
| loading new ones. At all times, you have to keep the load
| within tolerances so that your ship doesn't go "I'm out!" and
| roll over.
|
| So yeah, money alone can't solve this in 24 hours. They've
| got to calculate the load changes when they offload
| containers, so that you don't accidentally cause the ship to
| roll over in the canal. You're not going to stop that
| happening with a few bits of rope tied to some concrete
| pillars in the ground..
|
| [0] https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/EVER-GIVEN-
| IMO-9811000-...
|
| [1] https://www.dsv.com/en/our-solutions/modes-of-
| transport/sea-...
| cricalix wrote:
| And as a bit more context, the cranes that are used at
| ports are capable of moving 60+ tonnes[0] - physics becomes
| a bit of a problem when your crane is a lever..
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_crane
| anyfoo wrote:
| Is it even that easy to get any containers off the ship,
| without the machinery and infrastructure at ports?
|
| Is it common at all to get containers off a ship outside of
| docking areas?
| WJW wrote:
| Certainly not common, but it can be done with specialized
| vessels.
| cricalix wrote:
| Well, they fall off of ships all the time, especially in
| rough weather (all the time is hyperbole, but it
| absolutely happens). So sure, you can probably push one
| off with a pretty big lever, but shipping containers are
| actually designed to "clip" together to an extent, to
| make the load more solid. Problem is, the canal is only
| about 24 metres deep, so you're going to end up blocking
| the canal with containers instead if you just push them
| off.
|
| The modern shipping world is _all_ about containers,
| container cranes, and container ships. 99 Percent
| Invisible hosted some episodes of the Containers podcast
| [0] that will probably provide some insight.
|
| 0: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/containers-
| ships-tugs...
| jacquesm wrote:
| This baby can do it:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-26
|
| It will take time but that thing has the capacity.
| sliken wrote:
| Well it's a question of odds. Hard to imagine you couldn't
| get a big auger, drill a bunch of holes, put a bunch of
| telephone poles into the holes and start running steel cables
| + winch from each one to the end of the ship. Repeat on the
| other end of the canal/ship and start applying ever more
| force to realign the ship with the canal.
|
| Question is, what would happen? Would the ship move the sand
| it's embedded in, realign with the deepest part of the
| channel and move off?
|
| Or would the (potentially already damaged) hull breach?
| chki wrote:
| I'm also just speculating but my understanding is that there
| is already a lot of money behind this and that it simply
| takes time for companies specialized in salvaging ships to
| physically get there with their equipment and also develop a
| solution that works.
|
| I don't think more money would make those companies work
| faster and I don't think there is some reasonable alternative
| solution available other than using these companies.
| kergonath wrote:
| At some point no amount of money is enough to overcome
| Physics.
| tim333 wrote:
| For $1trn you could maybe nuke it and then rebuild the ship
| plus adjacent bits of Egypt? I'm not sure health and safety
| would approve.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Nine women can't make a baby in a month. Some things just take
| time, regardless of how much resources you throw at it.
| Black101 wrote:
| Somebody just have to come up with a good idea.... IE: blow
| up a boat load of C4 on the side of it...
| munk-a wrote:
| I'm pretty certain if you nuked the container ship you'd
| solve the first problem - it'd be messy and expensive but
| if you could explosively throw chunks out of the canal you
| could _probably_ resume service.
|
| And just imagine how badass the canal would look if we
| glassed the banks and lined them with some LEDs!
|
| (please don't do this)
| azornathogron wrote:
| I think you might inadvertently create a few new problems
| if you did this.
| munk-a wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing - that glassed canal would
| probably be so scenic that you'd cause several future
| traffic jams from private vessels and romantic cruises
| charting a path through the already near-capacity canal.
| krisoft wrote:
| Just in case you are not joking, what do you think blowing
| up C4 at the side of the ship would achieve?
| Black101 wrote:
| Yeah joking, but if the ship could survive the blast,
| maybe it could move the boat or move the dirt that is
| keeping it still
| WJW wrote:
| The canal is just 10 metres deeper than the ship and it's
| more than 10 metres high, so just blowing up the ship is
| not enough to clear the canal. You also need to take away
| the 200 million kg of steel afterwards. At that point it's
| easier to just wait for the Really Big Tugboats to come
| over.
| nomy99 wrote:
| not if you blow up so hard that there is a massive
| crater. Then let nature fill it up. Isn't the canal
| connected to large waterways on both ends
| jacquesm wrote:
| Worst case you end up with a nice replacement for
| Arecibo.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Something like this? Is this why they've asked all other
| ships to back up?
| https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1699656-world-war-iii
| xbar wrote:
| That's not exactly the problem here.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| You can dance on your head as hard as you can but nine
| women won't make a baby in one month.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| > Nine women can't make a baby in a month. This is my new
| favorite phrase.
| jl6 wrote:
| I'd like to question the premise of the financial impact of
| this... figures like "$400m/hour" are being bandied around as a
| measure of the lost trade. But this isn't necessarily lost trade
| - merely deferred trade.
|
| So surely the financial impact should be proportional to the
| interest you'd pay on $400m/hour?
|
| At ~3% interest, we're talking less than $1m/day.
|
| And so solutions that involve destroying the ship look less
| attractive.
| high_byte wrote:
| very hard to measure. some goods like food expire. scary to
| think what about the livestock. other goods lose value due to
| delays, etc.
| dan_hawkins wrote:
| Some goods are perishable. Modern logistics can have very tight
| deadlines.
| jl6 wrote:
| Perishable goods go by plane though. Containers are often
| held up in ports for weeks due to customs checks. I'd expect
| the vast majority of sea-shipped goods to be non-time-
| critical and unharmed by waiting for a couple of weeks.
| dan_hawkins wrote:
| I think you underestimate the volume of the perishable
| goods. Most are transported in containers:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerated_container
| einpoklum wrote:
| I wonder how much economic damage is caused every day that ship
| is stuck.
| mrep wrote:
| The canal generated 5.61 billion USD in 2020 [0] so it is
| costing them 15 million dollars a day in lost revenue. Shipping
| companies now have to go around Africa which costs uses more
| fuel and has other costs but now they don't have to pay the
| toll and I'm betting the spread between the toll price and the
| additional cost of going around Africa isn't very large or
| Egypt is leaving free money on the table.
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Authority#:~:text=I...
| zabzonk wrote:
| Summary of this thread: A bunch of people with no experience or
| knowledge of the problem come up with some half-arsed "solutions"
| because they think that they are smarter than people who do.
|
| Where have we heard this before? Oh yeah - Elon Musk rescuing
| people from a flooded cave.
| alottafunchata wrote:
| How about the COSCO ship that's been parked by the bay bridge
| forever?
| msandford wrote:
| People are talking about excavators but why isn't anyone talking
| about bulldozers? Sure the sand won't be amazing to pull against
| but it's a lot less movable than water.
|
| It's a Canal not the middle of the ocean. Should be able to get
| 20+ bulldozers on each side to try and straighten things out.
| They've got the gears and they've got the tracks. It might not
| work but it's got a lot better chances than tugs.
| jzl wrote:
| As bad as this seems, it's still a long way from the ships that
| were trapped in the Suez for ... eight years. Yep, eight years:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DiXRCo7eBs
| Imnimo wrote:
| At this point just fill in that section of the canal, leave the
| ship there, and dig a new canal.
| aleclarsoniv wrote:
| How insane would it be to flood the area around the ship with
| levees?
| gcanyon wrote:
| One nuclear bomb could fix this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
|
| Writing off the entire ship would cost _far_ less than the delays
| cost in a day.
| cmckn wrote:
| Visited this on my phone and it said "No.". I yelped. Turns out
| there's just an issue with the site on mobile! Still stuck.
| timgarner0 wrote:
| The site provides a tongue-in-cheek warning for this: "Tornado
| Guard warnings apply."
|
| https://xkcd.com/937
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| How does liability work here? Who is liable for all the work
| required to get the ship dug out? Who keeps the insurance that
| will pay for all this?
| jacob2484 wrote:
| Quite the arrogance here of mostly software devs trying to out
| -solutionize marine/shipping experts who undoubtedly have been
| consulted and are already looking for the quickest way to resolve
| the situation. With billions of dollars in stake, I'm sure even
| the most expensive experts are involved.
| mynameishere wrote:
| Is it totally implausible that ordinary intelligent people
| might have some ideas better than "put some tug boats on one
| end, and a single backhoe on the other end"? Because that's
| what your expensive experts have come up with so far.
|
| For my brilliant idea: Announce that everything on the ship is
| free, including the ship itself, and watch all the ragamuffins
| of Egypt strip it to nothing in a day.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| Ah yes, the solution isn't to consult experts, but to step
| back and expect racist stereotypes to solve the problem!
|
| Brilliant!
| adenozine wrote:
| I can understand your reaction, but the commenter might not
| have been thinking about racism that way. It's not crazy to
| think that poor people near a waterway might know a thing
| or two about strip salvaging. It was just phrased poorly, I
| think.
| Vhano wrote:
| as an Arab myself, I've done a fair bit of ship stripping and
| this may be a great idea. I may have enough tools in my
| backyard to strip a container ship and so does my neighbour
| Abdul Mohamed.
| person_of_color wrote:
| Kind of like geohot fixing covid
| dahdum wrote:
| Looks to me like everyone here is just having fun theorizing
| about it, I don't see much, if any, real arrogance.
| ngokevin wrote:
| Better than the coronavirus takes I've seen from software
| devs...
| vectorcrumb wrote:
| Like that guy who wrote a blog post about not waiting around
| after taking a COVID vaccine because it's a much greater risk
| than checking for an allergic reaction?
| Fiveplus wrote:
| Characteristic of any forum. We're nuanced wikipedia experts
| on every conceivable topic under the sun.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| I'm not sure it's arrogance. I'm reading these theories and
| suggestions as a fun thought experiment. I also like comparing
| the real solution, whatever it is, with my memory of the arm-
| chair solutions to see how far off the mark they are.
| golergka wrote:
| Kubernetes memes we got out of this are pure gold though.
| davesque wrote:
| Maybe people just find it to be an interesting problem and are
| having fun thinking out loud about it.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| I'm not even commenting and enjoying reading these ideas.
| nullsense wrote:
| No need to leave a comment then.
| jldugger wrote:
| ... but I think we've also identified a market for a Poly
| Bridge style game where you try to unstuck a containers ship
| from the canal in increasingly absurd ways.
| a9h74j wrote:
| How soon will this be standard in SV interviews?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I think the people chatting would have to be involved in some
| way for amateur theories to be problematic.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| We're kind of like physicists: https://xkcd.com/793/
| divbzero wrote:
| "Now consider a spherical ship..."
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't like the spherical cow meme because it misses the
| point. The assumption isn't that the cow is a sphere but
| rather that all cows have 4 legs, all cows give milk, there
| are lots of cows, etc. From a cursory glance these may look
| completely reasonable, until they aren't. Some cows injured
| their legs and can't walk. There are male "cows" that don't
| give milk. Sometimes there is only one cow. Meanwhile the
| spherical cow meme implies that there was never any truth
| to it in the first place.
|
| The complexity of life throws a wrench into everything.
| [deleted]
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It's damn fun and I'm looking forward to the n-gate analysis of
| this thread. In the mean time nuke that ship! Or more seriously
| what creating a parallel canal around that but for now. With
| dynamite.
| Havoc wrote:
| Yeah they flew in a 10 man team from Netherlands pretty much
| immediately
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| Had rockets not been so regulated, this problem could have easily
| been solved. It would not be cheap but with a 150million
| insurance budget it is doable. Egypt is losing 400million in
| trade every hour. The ship weighs 200 000 tons. You only need to
| drag it out of the sand, not bring it to LEO. Another option
| would be a lot of shaped charges but the side effects are much
| more catastrophic if things go wrong. In the olden days, they
| would just use nuclear (See project Plowshare for the Panama
| Canal).
|
| Before you downvote, do the math.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I like how everyone thinks that by using money, bombs, or
| radiation they can fix a carefully engineered project by
| essentially kicking it hard enough.
|
| Blowing a messy radioactive hole in the ground does not
| guarantee maritime navigability....
| gm3dmo wrote:
| This is Hacker News.
| riffraff wrote:
| > Egypt is losing 400million in trade every hour
|
| this seems excessive, if they made 400M in trade per hour that
| would be 3T per year, but Egypt's GDP is ~1T.
| suresk wrote:
| The ship weighs over 400 million lbs. Falcon Heavy has
| something like 5 million lbs of thrust at takeoff, but then
| each Falcon Heavy adds some weight. I'm not sure what type of
| fuel load it would need to lift something a few feet and drop
| it somewhere else? But you're probably going to need several
| hundred Falcon Heavys to move this ship.
|
| Then you have to attach them all to the ship somehow? Hopefully
| all of the rocket exhaust doesn't blow a bunch of containers
| around or melt the ship or anything.
|
| Then I guess hope that the ship has been engineered for a
| scenario where rockets are used to move it so that it doesn't
| come apart?
|
| Sure, I can't imagine why all of that wouldn't take more than a
| few days.
|
| If you mean using rockets to basically pull really hard on the
| ship and yank it out of the bank, then that's a little
| different - you still need several really big ones, but you can
| probably rip the ship apart just the same and make the problem
| 10x worse without quite as much effort.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| At the very least, why aren't they using helicopters to take
| the containers off one-by-one. That would reduce the overall
| weight, and it'd be easier to move an empty ship than one
| weighed down by cargo.
| dageshi wrote:
| Are there helicopters capable of lifting a fully loaded cargo
| container?
| kmonsen wrote:
| In addition to the weight issues, there are up to 20k of
| them on board.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| No. The absolute heaviest-lift helicopter, the MI-26, can
| lift a little over 20 short tons. Most helicopters can
| carry a ton or two at most.
|
| In comparison, unloaded shipping containers are already a
| few tons. Loaded ones are all over the place, of course,
| but max out at around 30.
| karagenit wrote:
| Not sure if that's possible. Some quick Googling told me a
| typical 40' cargo container has a capacity of 30 tons, but
| the largest commercial cargo helicopter (the Mi-26) can carry
| only 22 tons.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| I don't know the specifics of this one ship, but I thought
| container ships had hundreds, if not thousands of containers.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It has something like 20000 containers on it. Even if
| helicopters would lift a container off every 10 minutes, it
| wouldn't make any meaningful difference.
|
| Also, you can't do the maneuvering they were trying to with
| the tugs at the same time you're doing something like that,
| unless you want to kill someone.
|
| Unloading such a ship to empty would take a long time even if
| it's in port facilities under many cranes.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| The worlds highest capacity heavy lift helicopter can lift
| 44k lbs (russian M-26, estimated to be 20 in working
| condition). An empty 40 ft. container weighs 9k lbs. With a
| max loading of 66k lbs gross. The Ever Given has a capacity
| of 20k TEU, or 10k 40 ft. containers.
|
| Being generous, you could move maybe 5 per hour. Probably 1
| per hour would be realistic. But give them the benefit of the
| doubt and say they could move 20 per hour for some reason,
| including fuel and maintenance stops.
|
| So assuming that they could work 24 hours per day, they could
| do 480 containers per day (again assuming that all of the
| containers are 22k lbs lighter than capacity). They should be
| able to get this helicopter unloading done in 20 days of
| around the clock work with a bunch of highly optimistic
| assumptions.
|
| Plus they have to stay out of the way of the dozens of
| salvage workers trying to move the actual ship, while
| operating a soviet era machine in a VERY harsh desert
| environment with no infrastructure.
|
| If they need the ship to float higher, they would start by
| removing ballast, fuel, crew water, etc.
|
| Large salvage operations are notoriously expensive, tricky,
| dangerous, and often don't make sense to outsiders. There's a
| reason that there's really only about half a dozen firms
| worldwide that have the expertise and equipment to pull
| something like this off.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It looks like there might be a kind of priority difference
| going on here...
|
| To all the ship owners and cargo owners, this blockage is a
| big problem and massive amounts of money should be spent to
| solve it.
|
| But to the canal owners, they are only losing relatively
| small amounts of revenue by the canal being shut, so while
| they are sending all their boats to try pull it free, they
| aren't yet at the stage of calling in the army helicopters to
| help unload the ship.
|
| At some point Egypts government will probably get involved,
| and then the army will show up with tanks with a lot of
| pulling power, massive winches installed on the shoreline,
| and helicopters for unloading.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Just to throw some numbers out there, last year the canal
| grossed ~15 million USD/day in revenue from the toll
| charge.
| dragontamer wrote:
| An entire fleet of tug-boats seem unable to move the ship.
| I don't think tanks would fare much better.
|
| The proper solution is probably (?? I'm not an engineer,
| just spitballing here) a system of pulleys. See Archemedies
| and The Syracusia: Archemedies allegedly moved a ship
| powered only with his own muscles using only a system of
| pulleys as an assist.
|
| I realize that the Syracusia is probably smaller than this
| container ship in the canal. Still though: a system of
| pulleys is probably cheaper and stronger than what a team
| of Tanks would do.
|
| -------------
|
| They're at least in a situation where there's a ton of land
| nearby that can serve as an anchor point. I mean... the
| problem right now is probably just figuring out where and
| how to safely pull the ship. They need to apply hundreds-
| of-thousands of tons of force in a way that:
|
| 1. Won't break the ship apart
|
| 2. Successfully dislodges it
|
| Its a relatively simple problem to apply hundreds-of-
| thousands of tons of force. But doing it in such a way to
| keep the ship floating... that's the hard part.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Egypt is losing transit fees.
|
| A typical bulk carrier pays about $200,000 per transit.
|
| 51 ships transit the canal each day, on average.
|
| Egypt is losing $10m per day.
|
| Edit: the canal generated $5.85billion in revenue in 2018, or
| $16million per day.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-egypt-economy-suezcanal-i...
| yitchelle wrote:
| Egypt could claim the lost fees from the ship owner, maybe?
| p1mrx wrote:
| "The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run
| for survival as huge chunks of container blubber fell
| everywhere."
| frozenlettuce wrote:
| "the blast blew blubber beyond any believe boundaries"
| stragies wrote:
| The original source:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPuaSY0cMK8
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Brute force won't really help here, as the ship does not have
| the structural integrity to resist the force rocket engines
| would exert on it. Breaking the ship up would be catastrophic,
| as clean-up of many pieces would take a lot longer than getting
| it unstuck.
| jart wrote:
| Nuking the Suez canal was a better proposal than using the
| rocket boosters. The most important artery in the world is
| blocked right now and you're concerned about clean-up work?
| It's the desert!
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| I'm concerned about the clean-up work of the pieces that
| end up in the canal. The canal is pretty tight, there's not
| much space for debris in it without blocking it.
| electrotype wrote:
| Genuine question: why not simply pull its back in the reverse
| direction it was going, until its front is unstuck?
| artificial wrote:
| Both ends are jammed now.
| sliken wrote:
| Because the momentum of a huge ship dug quite deeply into the
| sides of the canal quite hard, so it's no longer floating.
|
| It's nowhere close to floating currently, and a ship can't be
| pulled with arbitrarily large forces without damage.
| vpribish wrote:
| the stern is stuck already in the other bank
| nitramm wrote:
| Do you know why half of the internet is using evergiven when on
| all the photos is written evergreen?
| ksm1717 wrote:
| Hi. pm me and I can explain you
| andylash wrote:
| The name of the company is Evergreen. All their ships start
| with Ever. This ship is Evergiven.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "Ever Grounded"?
| tsm wrote:
| Evergreen is the company name, Ever Given (which does appear on
| the ship in much smaller letters) is the ship's name.
| [deleted]
| jachee wrote:
| This confused me, too, at first.
|
| The vessel name (on the bow) is _Ever Given_.
|
| The company operating it, emblazoned on the side in large
| letters, is Evergreen.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Evergreen is the company, all their ships are named "Ever X"
| where "X" is some word that begins with "G".
|
| Like how some people name all their kids with the same first
| letter. I know, weird.
| snakeroman wrote:
| Evergreen is the company, Evergiven is the name of the ship.
| gizmo385 wrote:
| Because Evergreen is the name of the company that operates the
| ship [1] and Ever Given is the name of the ship [2].
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Marine
|
| [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_Given
| topspin wrote:
| Evergreen Marine Corporation owns the ship named Ever Given.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| evanlong wrote:
| Great minds think alike:
|
| https://isthesuezcanalblocked.com
| dnautics wrote:
| Principle of maximal irony prediction: the ship rolls over while
| trying to free it and the suez gets littered with containers,
| takes even longer to clear it.
| woutr_be wrote:
| A bit off topic, but anyone who ever played SnowRunner or
| MudRunner can probably relate. Quite often when you try to
| rescue a truck, you flip it over, and now require another truck
| with a crane to come over and load the cargo again.
| WJW wrote:
| The Dutch national news had an interview with the CEO of
| Boskalis, which is the company hired to unlodge the ship. They
| have one team on the ground atm and another building computer
| simulations exactly to calculate how much oil and ballast they
| can pump out (to lighten the ship up and make it easier to tow)
| without endangering the stability of the ship.
|
| Apparently they had a similar case (same size of ship) a few
| years back on the Elbe in Germany, in the end it took 12 (!) of
| the largest tugs they had to get it loose.
| em-bee wrote:
| do you mean this case? https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/frachter-
| rammt-faehre-knapp-an-d...
|
| that was the very same ship
|
| EDIT: no, the incident needing 12 tugs was a different ship.
| see comment below.
| Forge36 wrote:
| This gave me a good laugh.
| wussboy wrote:
| Oh my god who is driving this thing?
| hyperbovine wrote:
| When the wind picks up, nobody, which seems to be the
| problem.
| nullsense wrote:
| Reminds me of this which happened last year:
|
| https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/truck-crash-causes-havoc-
| on-au...
|
| Freak gust of wind tipped a truck over on a major bridge
| taking out a support beam. Took weeks to fix and jammed
| up traffic really bad.
|
| Shit happens.
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| Thats.. almost literally unbelievable. I almost want to
| suspect that that's a code name? For any sufficiently large
| ship that blocks a major waterway? Incredible.
| Anther wrote:
| Perhaps Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses is driving
| this one.
| BatFastard wrote:
| Very strange that it was the same ship, very strange!
| sliken wrote:
| I don't read German, but I can find reports of the same
| SIZE chip getting stuck on the Elbe and requiring 12 tugs
| to free it. The ship was called the CSCL Indian Ocean.
| mzs wrote:
| yep, thanks
|
| >On February 3, 2016 CSCL Indian Ocean grounded in the
| River Elbe, while approaching Hamburg, Germany. Her
| rudder controls were reported to have malfunctioned. It
| took almost a week to free her from the sandbank, because
| she grounded at high-tide. Her fuel was unloaded, and she
| was finally freed, February 9, six days later, during the
| next spring tide. Twelve tugboats were required to assist
| in freeing her. Two dredgers had helped cut away at the
| sandbank, near the grounding.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSCL_Indian_Ocean
| tim333 wrote:
| Sounds quite similar. This one also grounded at a high
| tide but a higher one is coming.
| doublesocket wrote:
| And again a strong wind was blamed. Maybe there's a limit
| to how big these ships can be built?
| em-bee wrote:
| the problem was the slow speed. i think even a small ship
| gets pushed by the wind at slow speeds. however a small
| ship can speed up faster, and it doesn't cause as much
| damage if it does crash into something.
| kmonsen wrote:
| Is that ship abnormally large or something or is this just
| a super wild coincidence?
| bolasanibk wrote:
| It is one of the largest container ships in the world.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_s
| hip...
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Why are all these within a few cm of 400m? Is there
| something special about this length?
| userbinator wrote:
| From the article:
|
| _Furthermore, some of the world 's main waterways such
| as the Suez Canal and Singapore Strait also restrict the
| maximum dimensions of a ship that can pass through them_
| culturestate wrote:
| There are limits to how big a ship can be and still
| transit a specific route, usually defined by the radius
| of curves in a canal or the length of a lock.
|
| In this case, 400m is the max length required for the
| Suez (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suezmax)
| agotterer wrote:
| I've always wondered what something like this costs and who
| is responsible for paying the bill?
| mark_mart wrote:
| I have the same question. I would think EverGreen as they
| are the root cause of problem. And it seems they cause
| regularly. (similar thing happened a few years ago by the
| very same ship)
| movedx wrote:
| Do you have a citation I can see? This isn't me
| challenging your assertion, I'm just interested to see
| what happened :)
| adenozine wrote:
| Not the previous commenter but it's linked in the
| comments already. Ctrl-F "dutch" and you'll see a german
| news story about it
| lordnacho wrote:
| You'd think there would be liability insurance like with
| cars.
| elif wrote:
| Weeks? My 0.02 is dig a bypass using dredges/pumps, then it's a
| 'days' problem.
|
| Of course it won't help this ship, but at least the canal
| functions.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Digging a bypass is not a days problem, that's a years problem.
| Everything about this problem is massive.
|
| The shipping lane of the Suez canal is 20 m deep and 77 m wide.
| The maximum ship length is 400 m, so the turning radius
| required to get into the bypass is literally miles long.
| cozzyd wrote:
| It would be a lot shorter to "just" dig a canal in front of
| the ship and park it in there forever, but would still
| probably take too long.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| Has anyone checked the ship's manifest? Maybe we'll get lucky and
| find out it's carrying 20,000 containers of thermite.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Needs a counter for ongoing cost. An experienced military
| logistics person I know estimated yesterday that the bill for
| this is up to about $40 billion already.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| That might be the total value of impacted shipping, but nobody
| is going to get a $40 billion bill for this.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Do they have deadlines for delivery and late fees? I've heard
| a quarter of the worldwide cargo capacity will be delayed by
| this event, this could rise very fast.
| blhack wrote:
| Those two guys on excavators are gonna be RICH!
| avaldeso wrote:
| Unless they, somehow, rip a hole in the hull. That would be
| FUBAR.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| There will not be a single bill of that size, and directly
| insured costs are likely to top out at a 1-200 million. But
| the knock-on shipping delays are likely not insured and will
| weigh heavily on the charter sector (who rent space on the
| ships by the day): https://lloydslist.maritimeintelligence.in
| forma.com/LL113625...
|
| An interesting stat there is that on the _Ever Given_ alone
| there are ~20,000 boxes (cargo containers) with an average 20
| shipments (from different people) in each. So that 's
| ~400,000 commercial deliveries held up on one ship alone.
| divbzero wrote:
| Could anyone end up being liable for this? For example, could
| delayed ships sue canal operators who in turn sue the owners of
| Ever Given? Alternatively, would an event like this be covered
| by any insurance policies?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Don't know about liability but per my sibling comment, only
| about 10% of shipments are covered for delays.
| sn_master wrote:
| Where is Superman when you need one . They should make this part
| of the next movie.
| mseepgood wrote:
| Why not send thousands of men with shovels? That's how canals
| were dug in the past.
| wayanon wrote:
| It's refreshing to see a problem that's easy to identify.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| Has Elon Musk volunteered to fly out there with a portable
| submarine yet?
| hikerclimb wrote:
| I hope it never gets unstuck
| johncessna wrote:
| Given how important this canal is, I would have thought multiple
| countries have literally wargamed how to remove a blockade from
| the canal in a way that makes it still usable for shipping.
| interestica wrote:
| Just adding a random voice to this cluster of a thread.
|
| Lots of talk about lifting via crane or chopper. And it's not
| clear that it's possible. I just saw a photo of the rear (side?)
| Of ship that makes me wonder: how much _lateral_ force would you
| need? Could you jack a container up an inch and then slide it
| off?
| bythckr wrote:
| n00b question: how tough is to steer the ship through the canal?
| Is this a silly mistake or a genuine mistake? Will the Captain of
| the ship get fined? Who will foot the bill of this whole rescue
| operation? Also, how much extra cost & days will it take for a
| ship to take the other (longer) route?
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| Site author here, I guess this is why the New York Times API
| keeps hitting rate limits.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Interesting project. WOndering if you could write a blog about
| building that site.
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| I could, though it would be summarised in about one sentence:
| "NextJS and Vercel make everything stupidly easy."
| markus_zhang wrote:
| haha thanks man!
| float4 wrote:
| Cool! How much traffic are you handling at the moment / at
| peak?
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| I actually have no idea. It was just a bit of fun so I
| haven't got any logs/analytics set up at all.
| Jedd wrote:
| An image showing an excavator near the pointy end.
|
| I'm sure the overwhelming scale is reduced at this proximity.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/aAyrXub.jpeg
| tomcam wrote:
| Maybe disassemble part of the ship to disgorge its contents
| closer to equipment?
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Egypt State Income: ca 95.8 billion Canal Revenue: 27.2 billion
| Makes per revenue per day 74.520.547 74 Million dollars Tax
| Revenue consumed by ship so far * days: 4 days * 74.520.547 =
| 298.082.191
|
| If this blockade lasts for 12 days it has reached 1 billion loss
| >= 1/100 of the egypt household. That household is already under
| stress from the "escape from cairo"-plans
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Administrative_Capital) and
| covid.
| cleansy wrote:
| It's not that dramatic:
|
| > In 2020, the total revenue generated amounted to 5.61 billion
| USD and 18,829 ships with a total net tonnage of 1.17 billion
| passed through the canal. [1]
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Authority#Revenues
| ineedasername wrote:
| Every question with a binary answer should have its own website
| like this. I would, in particular, like a website for every room
| in my house with the question "are my car keys in this room?"
|
| Then I would create an rss feed of each site and subscribe to
| them.
| 205guy wrote:
| The tile device works for members of my family who misplace
| their keys OR their phone:
|
| https://www.thetileapp.com/
| jahewson wrote:
| That's an O(n) car key search, if you instead asked the
| question "are my car keys in this half of the house?" you could
| perform a binary search O(log n).
| nabakin wrote:
| A bit off-topic but I think worth noting. The VesselFinder map on
| this website is incredibly smooth and responsive! Every time I
| open up Google Maps, I feel how bloated it is despite running on
| the Pixel 5, Google's very own latest flagship device! It seems
| to me Google doesn't care much about Maps' performance if I feel
| more comfortable navigating maps using some random, web embed.
| After looking around the embed a bit, turns out it's powered by
| OSM! Even though I have never used OSM before, I should have
| guessed. Truly nice work on this OSM and VesselFinder. It's
| honestly euphoric to find software which performs so well despite
| not having access to billions of dollars in resources.
| kristofferR wrote:
| It's using OpenLayers.
|
| https://openlayers.org/
| nabakin wrote:
| OpenLayers uses OSM. If you go to the VesselFinder website,
| you can see them give credit to OSM in that map and the
| OpenLayers website mentions they use OSM. Guess I should have
| mentioned OpenLayers too since it actually implements the map
| UI so ty.
| SilverRed wrote:
| OSM is primarily just a datasource. Different consumers of
| the data will have different UIs and performance.
| gm3dmo wrote:
| Smit salvage have got this. I just hope they had enough notice to
| to take their film crew with them:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/SmitSalvageTowage/videos
| aidenn0 wrote:
| They said "days to weeks" for how long it will take, so they
| got plenty of time to film it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Who else? They'll get the job done but I don't think they are
| going to accept any deadline.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| This is the moment for Egypt to learn about backups. Dig a
| secondary canals next to the existing one. Under normal
| operations, have one serve the southbound traffic and the other
| one serving northbound traffic. In crisis, one can be blocked
| while the other switches direction every six hours or so.
|
| Yes, it is expensive. But not as expensive as having a canal
| blocked is for the world economy and the Egyptian government.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Would a good old ship camel work? Position some huge water-filled
| tanks underneath the ship, pump the water out and replace with
| air, to lift the ship up. Then hopefully it becomes unstuck
| enough to tow it clear.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_camel
|
| In comparison with other proposed solutions I've seen, it would
| probably not rip the ship apart if distributed evenly over the
| hull. Yes, the ship is huge, but plain plastic containers and
| pumps scale quite nicely. Although in good armchair engineering
| tradition, I have not run the numbers.
| Balgair wrote:
| One missing part of the discussion is _how_ this large ship got
| stuck. Brenden Greely of The Financial Times had a good possible
| take the other day on the Bank Effect:
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d...
|
| Essentially, Bernoulli's Principle makes these large ships
| susceptible to jack-knifing in narrow canals.
|
| Faster moving water creates a lower pressure zone. Water moves
| fastest near the stern of the boat. This is why the bow will tend
| to rise when a ship is moving quickly; the stern can bee seen as
| being sucked down almost.
|
| In the Suez the 24m deep bed of the canal makes the water move
| very fast near the stern of the ship. This will also occur near
| the banks of the canal. With these very large ships, the effect
| is more pronounced, as there is less cross-sectional area for the
| water to move past.
|
| If a ship gets near the banks, then you'll get the fast low
| pressure water acting on the bank-side of the stern _and_ the
| bottom. Add your force vectors up, the ship torques, and does a
| 'wheelie' off the bank, jack-knifing the canal.
|
| The big problem here is that these superships _all_ are
| susceptible to this. It 's a matter of hydrodynamics. The bigger
| the ship, the worse it gets. Meaning that economics comes
| crashing into physics, and we all know who will win that fight.
| piinbinary wrote:
| I wonder if they could build a dam around the ship and lift it
| with water.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Physically that would work, but this ship has a draught of 14.5
| meters. You'd need to build a pretty high dam. It would need to
| cross the canal twice, as otherwise the water level inside the
| dam would never be higher than the current water level, and
| you'd need to pump in the water. Then, once the ship floats,
| you'd somehow need to move it out of your small artificial lake
| into the canal, and remove the dam you created in the canal.
|
| It's easier to lighten the ship.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Nuke the thing. Crater fills with water. Continue.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Sort of like blowing up a dead, beached whale? :) p.s. if that
| doesn't ring a bell with you:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yes, exactly like that, which I had been thinking of. :)
| [deleted]
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| Panama Canal Authority soon to announce widening capital works.
|
| > As Relay's chief competitor in this region, we of Windsong have
| benefited modestly from the overflow; however, until now we
| thought it inappropriate to propose a coordinated response to the
| problem.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| Is it naive to suggest that they start digging a detour around
| this roadblock? I feel like it would take less time to do that
| than to try to move the ship out of the way.
|
| The Army Corps of Engineers can build waterways and levies like
| it's nobody's business.
| saberdancer wrote:
| Dig it with what? By the time you could get anything in place
| and start digging any sort of a detour, you'll get this ship
| removed.
|
| This is not a small detour. These ships can't turn well so any
| detour would need to be very long and would take months to dig
| out (even if you had infrastructure in place to do it).
|
| You could nuke it though. Throw a bunch of nukes in a line and
| you are good to go. :D
| avaldeso wrote:
| > You could nuke it though. Throw a bunch of nukes in a line
| and you are good to go. :D
|
| I don't know if you're joking or not but there were tactical
| demolition nukes in the 60's. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /Special_Atomic_Demolition_Mu...
| laurent92 wrote:
| When in doubt, C4. But it wouldn't even help: It is shallow
| and there isn't enough water to fill such a hole.
| TedShiller wrote:
| I feel like this whole thing is a perfect metaphor for the
| current US government
| anticristi wrote:
| Not sure how much time it took to build the website, but I assume
| the author bets on a long shelf life. :)
| rbx wrote:
| Apparently, the ship drew a giant penis before getting stuck:
| https://nypost.com/2021/03/24/cargo-ship-drew-penis-before-g...
| milliams wrote:
| They're missing the attribution to OpenStreetMap.
| habi wrote:
| It seems to me that this is more a problem of the embed from
| vesselfinder.com.
|
| I just noted this here: https://github.com/grischard/osm-
| lacking-attribution/issues/...
| Havoc wrote:
| Surprised nobody has suggested blowing it up yet haha
| almostarockstar wrote:
| Dig a bypass canal and leave the ship there.
| blhack wrote:
| I don't think people are giving enough credit to _how_ stuck the
| ship is.
|
| Look at some of the photos of the front of it. Look at how far
| out of the water it is sitting. The ship might look like that if
| it were totally empty, but not when it is full of containers like
| this.
|
| Some people saying: just drag it off of the sand. Okay! And what
| happens when that causes you to rip a hole into the hull of the
| ship? Now it's _really_ stuck.
|
| Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think you
| realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship. You're
| basically asking to build a port in the middle of the egyptian
| desert. That isn't going to happen.
|
| It's really stuck. It's probably going to take a couple of weeks
| to get it unstuck.
| adflux wrote:
| Love the armchair engineers who think they're gonna solve this
| better than billion dollar companies
| lamontcg wrote:
| Just let the air out of the tires, simple.
| fuzxi wrote:
| Why don't they just give me a long enough lever so I can
| simply lift the ship out of the canal?
| imtringued wrote:
| Put huge hydraulic cylinders below the ship. The obvious
| problem is, what are those cylinders anchored to?
| yitchelle wrote:
| Put balloons around it to give extra buoyancy. That should
| work.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| That actually is something that you can do in smaller
| salvage operations. The technical word for these balloons
| is lift bag.
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| I searched for the biggest ones I could find this week
| and it was something like several tons. So we only need
| about 10 thousand of them.
| cryptonector wrote:
| And the key words are "smaller salvage operations".
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Or with crabs, potc style! /s
| Arrath wrote:
| Just bring in a Bagger 288[1] and use it to excavate a new
| diversion canal in front of the ship long enough to get it
| out of the main canal, bada-bing bada-boom. Simple!
|
| [1]Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azEvfD4C6ow
| _ph_ wrote:
| That beast is really outstanding and would probably be
| able to do the job in reasonable time. This machine is so
| insanely large, it would fit into any sci-fi movie. The
| craziest thing is, some years back it was driven over a
| distance of 22 kilometers cross country to a different
| site, which was just mindblowing.
| tim333 wrote:
| It's entertaining. I think a big winch or two to drag it off.
| atdt wrote:
| It's a way of thinking out loud and providing an opening for
| someone more knowledgeable to explain what is being
| overlooked. It makes for interesting threads.
| DanBC wrote:
| > It makes for interesting threads.
|
| The threads are not particularly interesting because people
| make the same suggestions over and over again.
| jonplackett wrote:
| In that case... why don't we get Elon Musk's Submarine to
| get it out?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I bet they could hook up a bunch of Falcon-9's or Super
| Heavies to the ship and launch it into orbit.
| jonplackett wrote:
| That's a pay per view event waiting to happen.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Any volunteer pedo guys about to help?
| sjg007 wrote:
| This is how every post and comment works on HN.
| VRay wrote:
| It's pretty great. I hope this serves as a lesson to some
| people
|
| "If these jokers will talk this much about this even
| though they clearly know nothing at all about the tech
| involved, what does that say about their comments on all
| the other threads here?"
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| Also known as the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
| arkitaip wrote:
| It's hilariously arrogant too.
| breckinloggins wrote:
| I feel like we need a "why don't you just?" safe word,
| where the intent is to signify "hey I'm not being a
| smartass, I'm really just curious about why this
| seemingly simple solution won't actually work".
|
| So much of what happens on the internet is in bad faith
| that it makes it really hard to just have innocent
| conversations without being misunderstood. :-(
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Agreed. I've thought the same for posting an interesting
| fact. Anymore, I want to preface every single one by
| saying, "hey, you may already know this; I'm just sharing
| it because it hasn't been mentioned yet and I think it's
| neat. If you were implying the fact already, I apologize
| for overlooking that."
| rjmill wrote:
| I try to replace any "I think..." and "Why don't they
| just..." comments with "I wonder if..." ones.
|
| I've found it communicates my curiosity in a way that's
| less likely to be misinterpreted. It's made my
| internet/IRL conversations much more productive.
| adolph wrote:
| Leading with "One weird trick that..." will increase your
| CPM, guaranteed.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| "Why is the following wrong:"
|
| "What's the problem with"
|
| "What's the problem with training every pigeon in the
| world to grab on and fly it out of there?"
|
| "Why is the following wrong: They could get a shitload of
| muskrats and have them dig out the banks?"
|
| Etc. Suggestions made obviously ridiculous.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > So much of what happens on the internet is in bad faith
|
| ... and I have to admit I'm still not able to easily
| recognize the difference between bad faith and utter lack
| of experience and/or intelligence without digging deep
| into the history of the individual posting such
| "questions".
|
| And the need for that extra digging makes such questions
| effectively the same waste of time and emotional energy
| as responding to a troll.
| breckinloggins wrote:
| Same. It's super easy to know when _I_ am communicating
| in good faith, but it 's not so trivial to know when
| _you_ are.
|
| You know those scenes in the movies where two characters
| circle around each other giving the side eye like "so are
| you fucking with me or are we cool?"
|
| Twitter in particular feels like a whole site of people
| doing that. :)
| umanwizard wrote:
| You don't need to do the digging if you follow the rules
| of the site, which include interpreting others' comments
| as charitably as possible.
| lovemenot wrote:
| Why dont you just coin a new phrase? Perhaps it'll stick.
| breckinloggins wrote:
| I've actually seen literal quotes before, e.g. a question
| like:
|
| "Why don't you just" get a bunch of people on rafts and
| row real fast to push it off?
| umanwizard wrote:
| Because if it doesn't stick, everyone else will just
| think you're annoying (like the "fetch" girl in Mean
| Girls).
| [deleted]
| ksd482 wrote:
| Maybe but maybe not.
|
| Like the parent comment said, it's a way of thinking out
| loud.
|
| For e.g., when someone says "just dig it out, it just
| pull it away...", I give them a benefit of doubt by
| assuming what they are really saying is "I know it's not
| as simple as just pulling it out but can someone explain
| why we can't though?"
| [deleted]
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| What do you think people at "billion dollar companies" do
| in such situation?
|
| Exactly the same thing. Just not on a public board. Just
| like everyone else is doing when discussing problems they
| face in any line of work.
|
| Since it's unlikely anyone here has any decision making
| power relevant to the Suez canal, look at this discussion
| as an exercise in group problem solving. Sharpening the
| saw.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| > Exactly the same thing.
|
| Not exactly-exactly. There are (e.g.) 1000 suggested
| solutions.
|
| 950/1000 of them are silly, stupid, impossible,
| -facepalm-, etc.
|
| 25/1000 are doable.
|
| 10/25 are doable and cost less than the other 25
|
| 5/10 are faster than others
|
| 2/5 are actively being investigated, and of course they
| won't be announced to 'us'. They
| (thinkers/engineers/specialists) will have to talk to
| their CEOs/COOs/CFOs, insurance companies, Egypt's
| military, handlersof the canal, and a bunch of other key
| stakeholders.
|
| (my ratios are pure guesstimates, but it makes sense that
| there is a selection process, and we won't figure them
| out from our couches)
| 7952 wrote:
| And some that are doable will not be safe enough.
| efitz wrote:
| It always amuses me how much specialists in one field
| think that their expert status is transferable to other
| fields.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I think its that when you know something really well, you
| feel like you're in control. When you have a new problem,
| that emotion doesn't go away...
| ortusdux wrote:
| Cunningham's Law: "The best way to get the right answer on
| the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the
| wrong answer."
| meowster wrote:
| So far I haven't really seen any other suggestions saying
| to cut the bolbous bow off. The ship can still sail without
| it.
| andygates wrote:
| That's the most obvious part of the grounding, but the
| ship is properly wedged at both ends. It's not the whole
| problem.
| meowster wrote:
| It's wedged at the stern because the bow impelled the
| ground. The stern isn't impelled, once the front of the
| ship is free, the back be easily ungrounded by tugs.
| gregoriol wrote:
| That's what some scientists said about mRNA research
| prox wrote:
| If this was space engineers I would build a crane drone and
| offload it unto nearby ships. Or build giant trucks to help
| the ship get unstuck.
|
| Or just tow it outside the environment...
| gizmo385 wrote:
| > Or just tow it outside the environment...
|
| For those who haven't seen this video...
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
| topspin wrote:
| Where is Elon when you need him?
| bluescrn wrote:
| How many Raptor engines would we need here?...
| ericj5 wrote:
| He just offered to build them a little submarine
| marvin wrote:
| I don't think Musk will give unsolicited help to anyone
| ever again, after the spectacular form of gratitude the
| underwater capsule was received with.
| kergonath wrote:
| That ship is never going to fit in that submarine.
| tengbretson wrote:
| Congrats! You've discovered that engineers like to stretch
| their imaginations and theorize about solutions to problems
| for their own fun and enjoyment
| olalonde wrote:
| That's how a lot of billion dollar companies got started.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| We have the luxury of just throwing around ideas and not
| caring about the consequences (because nobody in power will
| read it). It's just fun to think about how you'd solve a
| problem like this.
|
| For example I'd try to attach a two Raptor engines to the
| ship and blow it back to the water :)
| nullsense wrote:
| The salvage company hired to fix this problem is probably
| just reading this thread and nodding along like yeah that
| could work. Great idea HN!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Or tear the ship apart :). Which makes me think - why not
| cut the ship in half? Two pieces will be easier to dislodge
| and tow away :).
| gregoriol wrote:
| Someone actually is trying that idea in Georgia right now
| (https://www.thedrive.com/news/34648/capsized-cargo-ship-
| in-g...) but it really is not easy!
|
| Many likely problems: equipment avilability to do so,
| time it will take, debris falling off and from the
| operations, risk of capsizing, probably need to load
| pieces on barges/crane but canal is not much large
| prof-dr-ir wrote:
| in half? I would not go for less than nine pieces.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ENOJBLVgjw
| ampersandy wrote:
| What a fascinating watch! That they were able to produce
| such clean cuts through the entire ship with the cutting
| wire is absolutely incredible.
| danaris wrote:
| I think there's still room for suggesting potential solutions
| that might _work_ , even if they make the operation of the
| cargo ship (even more?) unprofitable for its owners.
|
| That said, the ones mentioned there don't pass the smell
| test.
| undefined1 wrote:
| but did they try turning it off and on again?
| nullsense wrote:
| The canal or the ship?
|
| Maybe if you kill the ship it respawns at its port of
| origin?
| austhrow743 wrote:
| Why didn't anyone think of this before? Internet commenting
| is over folks. This guy realised its not productive.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| Billion dollar companies are filled with people. Nothing
| special about billion dollar companies except money. I wish
| money equated to great ideas.
| tim333 wrote:
| Outfits like SMIT also have a lot of experience with this
| kind of thing, plus some equipment.
| zepearl wrote:
| Detonate a small but still relatively powerful bomb upstream
| (or maybe multiple small but staggered ones), to create a
| small tsunami-like wave, which in turn will move at least the
| ship's aft/stern (as the ship creates in the canal a "V"-like
| shape which will therefore concentrate most of the wave's
| force in that area) when it hits it. Almost guaranteed to
| work, theoretically.
| Transfinity wrote:
| IIRC the banks of the canal aren't very high above the
| water level.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Raising the banks for say 1/2 mile on either end of the
| ship might not be impossible? Maybe?
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Or more likely, it will break the hull apart and then there
| are 5000 containers stuck in the bottom of the canal.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I assume you're The Person that Googles the answer to every
| discussion you have with your friends rather than having a
| little fun with it.
| busyant wrote:
| > armchair engineers who think they're gonna solve this
| better than billion dollar companies
|
| There are 2 types of armchair engineers.
|
| The ones who sneer and say, "If they just <x> then it would
| be fixed because I know best" Those people are bores.
|
| There are others who are just tossing ideas around: partly
| for amusement and partly because they enjoy thinking, "What
| would I do in this situation ...?"
|
| I haven't seen too many bores in this thread.
|
| I don't think this latter group _seriously_ thinks they know
| better than experts, and I have found the various ideas and
| counterarguments interesting to read.
| m463 wrote:
| and... and... what?
| busyant wrote:
| Sorry, I was typing 1/2-thoughts & talking to someone. I
| deleted the sentence fragment.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Yes, most here are armchair engineers, though quite a few
| actual engineers around, so you never know. But the
| embarassing point is: the billion dollar companies currently
| also don't seem to have an idea about the possible solution
| :p. I am pretty optimistic that they will come up with a
| reasonable plan soon, but there is a nonzero chance that
| someone here will come up with a good idea. Sometimes it
| quite helps to be at a distance.
| tim333 wrote:
| From the actual engineers
|
| https://www.tradewindsnews.com/casualties/salvors-warn-
| ever-...
| [deleted]
| umanwizard wrote:
| Proposing ideas shouldn't be taken as suggesting that the
| poster is confident the ideas are correct, but rather as an
| invitation to talk through whether it would work and maybe
| learn something interesting.
| wongarsu wrote:
| So you are complaining that on a startup forum people are
| trying to solve billion dollar questions?
|
| Besides, billion dollar companies often miss things. Yes,
| they have the more relevant experts and much better data than
| we, but they have to content with internal and external
| politics and have fewer people throwing around ideas.
| Sometimes the answer is to "why haven't you done X" is simply
| "nobody with a voice to be heard had that idea". If billion
| dollar companies were the infallible giants you make them out
| to be then startups straight up couldn't work.
| [deleted]
| grenoire wrote:
| Weeks are measured in what I'd call, a lot of money. Is it a
| consolidation of funds sort of issue? Anybody responsible for
| getting it fixed?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| The people who should be desperately trying to pay a lot of
| money to get the ship unstuck are maritime insurance
| underwriters. There is a lot of insurance against late
| delivery. Unless they have managed to figure out how this is
| an act of god, that is.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| That's what they're claiming - it was unexpectedly heavy
| winds in a sandstorm that caused it to ground.
|
| Also, they had two canal pilots on board. I'm pretty sure
| that this absolves the shipping company of responsibility
| for guiding the ship safely.
| fuzxi wrote:
| Seems it's not always so cut-and-dry.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26564849
| WJW wrote:
| They hired a company specialized in this kind of stuff
| (Boskalis), but as their CEO mentioned of TV it depends on
| how stuck it is. If you're lucky, pumping out the fuel and
| ballast can make the ship light enough to drag it clear with
| tugboats. If that doesn't work, you might have to unload
| some, most or all of the 20k containers from the ship to make
| it light enough. It can be done, but depending on how much is
| required it'll take a few days to a week to get the required
| equipment all the way to Egypt.
| maxerickson wrote:
| If I estimated right, the fuel is a few percent of the
| total mass (maybe around 5%). Not the most encouraging
| result.
| userbinator wrote:
| If it was floating, raising it out of the water by 5%
| would not be insignificant, and help relieve some of the
| forces holding it in place.
| FranOntanaya wrote:
| I wonder what's the margin for raising the center of
| gravity too much out of the water without risking it
| tipping, with all that cargo on top.
| eternalban wrote:
| Egypt is bleeding money right now. It earned roughly USD
| 15,360,000.00/day from Suez passage fees in 2020.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Authority#Revenues
| Aperocky wrote:
| Wow, costs $300K to transit through the canal per ship by
| fee alone? That is capital intensive.
|
| It's amazing that more ships are not simply sailing around
| Africa.
| decker wrote:
| Given that so many ships that are run by people who can
| afford $300k per trip, which could pay the annual salary
| for a team of analysts, it's amazing you're making this
| comment.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Their daily operating costs are a significant fraction of
| the $300,000 and it saves a couple weeks.
|
| (tens of thousands of dollars just for fuel each day)
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I'd imagine it is riskier sailing all the way around
| Africa than through the Suez, right?
| tim333 wrote:
| It's risky for small boats due to the huge waves down
| there. Huge cargo ships seem to manage ok.
| secfirstmd wrote:
| Not really. Think of costs of fuel, costs of crew, I
| created insurance, slower delivery times.
| [deleted]
| listenallyall wrote:
| The ship can hold 20,000 containers so the fee is only
| $15 each. By comparison, it costs $16 to take the Lincoln
| Tunnel into Manhattan.
| sb057 wrote:
| The $300K cost is actually calculated to be just below
| the amount it would cost extra to sail around the cape,
| adjusting for other factors, of course.
|
| There's actually a robust and competitive market for
| intercontinental shipping canals:
|
| https://www.industryweek.com/ideaxchange/article/21965825
| /su...
| tim333 wrote:
| They do sometimes depending on oil prices and how much of
| a hurry they are in
| https://www.imarest.org/themarineprofessional/on-the-
| radar/i...
| listenallyall wrote:
| I think this is the hidden story here. Egypt doesn't have a
| particularly strong economy, its stock market (unlike the
| US) is 40% below 2018, it's currency fell more than 50% vs
| USD in 2016 and has only recovered a few percent, and it
| (like the US) appears to have significantly more debt than
| ever before. And the entire globe is still somewhat covid-
| depressed economically.
|
| When governments, banks and major companies are highly
| leveraged, all it takes is temporary system shocks to
| collapse the whole thing. It's not just the lost canal
| revenue, it's tons of companies in the region that can't
| get their goods to international markets which slows
| capital flows, tax revenue, import/export tariffs, etc.
| Will be interesting to see the effects.
|
| https://tradingeconomics.com/egypt/currency
| https://tradingeconomics.com/egypt/external-debt
| imtringued wrote:
| That's more than 5% of the total government revenue. It can
| definitively lead to instability in the currency because
| the government might be forced to print the deficit if it
| cannot secure funding through other means. The inflation
| rate is well above 2% which means that the government
| should cut spending and only put money into investments
| that net a return (cleaning up the canal nets a return).
| bostonfincs wrote:
| Military does it all the time with helicopters. Not cheap or
| easy but probably the most likely outcome
| nomy99 wrote:
| People think I'm joking but we should bomb it to smithereens.
| The crater would probably just fill up with the water flow.
| neither_color wrote:
| This was my idea but I figured I'd get laughed out of the
| comments. Glad I'm not the only one considering it.
| [deleted]
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| If this had gotten stuck in 1960s Russia they would have done
| that already.
| nullserver wrote:
| And 70 years later the radiation levels would be getting
| back to normal.
| [deleted]
| nomy99 wrote:
| Can use this to avoid radiation :]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_of_All_Bombs
| fogihujy wrote:
| Ironically, the blast radius of that thing is still
| smaller than the ship that would need to be blown up. If
| you really want to clear the canal with an explosion, it
| would have to be one large enough to vaporize the ship,
| making sure there's no debris in the canal afterwards.
| nradov wrote:
| How many tons of explosives would be required to "bomb it to
| smithereens" without leaving wreckage that blocks the canal?
| Please calculate and show your work.
| mrep wrote:
| Oregon tried that with a dead beached whale 50 years ago.
| Results hilarious:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34
| nomy99 wrote:
| Not enough bomb :[
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| What would be the total loss cost of this ship?
| cdelsolar wrote:
| less than the cost of the canal being blocked for multiple
| weeks
| [deleted]
| tinus_hn wrote:
| If it is any indication, other ships are turning around and
| betting on the two weeks journey around Africa.
| ric2b wrote:
| Imagine if one of those also gets stuck while turning around.
| samizdis wrote:
| > Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think
| you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship.
|
| It seems, though, that a partial unloading is being considered
| by a professional in the field according to quotes in an
| article in The Guardian [1]:
|
| _However, Peter Berdowski, CEO of Boskalis, a specialist
| dredging company that has sent a crew to the scene, said data
| so far suggested "it is not really possible to pull it loose"
| and that the ship may need to be unloaded. "We can't exclude it
| might take weeks, depending on the situation," Berdowski told
| Dutch television.
|
| He said the ship's bow and stern had been lifted up against
| either side of the canal. "It's like an enormous beached whale.
| It's an enormous weight on the sand. We might have to work with
| a combination of reducing the weight by removing containers,
| oil and water from the ship, tugboats and dredging of sand."_
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/25/suez-canal-
| blo...
| yottalove wrote:
| Instead of listing possible technologies and solutions to the
| problem of re-floating the container ship, why not make an
| ordered list of worst possible outcomes and approach the
| problem from the least-worst?
|
| I'll start:
|
| 1. pull the ship out of the sand by force with a fleet of
| tugs which tears a hole in the ship causing an angle of loll
| and to subsequently keel over.
| Sudophysics wrote:
| Ok, I know it sounds crazy. But what if they put a correctly
| sized explosive(s) deep enough below and along the spine to
| blow and then fill the area with water, reducing the
| rheological load? We're talking about 100 feet underneath the
| canal bed, and do it with a shaped charge that'll be more
| optimal for the task. Just thinking about fast <1 week
| methods.
| eCa wrote:
| If they can dig a tunnel along the boat a 100 feet deep,
| that would probably be enough to set it free. No need for a
| boatload of C4 then.
| mattr47 wrote:
| Elon Musk probably has a team working on it.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| How do you stop the ship from collapsing onto the boring
| device?
| blinky1456 wrote:
| I was wondering if it is sand, can it be liquefied using
| vibration around the hull to help loosen it? Something like
| what they use to vibrate concrete while pouring it.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV4sTbpa7Hc
| NoOneNew wrote:
| So... you want to be the one responsible if it doesn't go
| as planned? Further blocking the canal, let alone damages
| to the ship and cargo on board.
|
| Theres a reason wacky, dangerous ideas happen in the movies
| and not real life. The consequences of trying to look
| clever and failing are pretty severe.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Works in cartoons!
| goldenkey wrote:
| Can we just drop some anvils while we are at it? Why ask
| Tesla to help when ACME has never let us down?
| tinus_hn wrote:
| I say we attach a giant helium balloon!
| samuell wrote:
| Or, use airships to unload the containers (as choppers
| can't lift enough weight)...
| bipson wrote:
| Not just a professional in the field, he works for the
| company that got the assignment.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Perhaps the classic beached whale clearing technique [0]
| would work.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/V6CLumsir34
| BasDirks wrote:
| I cried, fantastic.
| rosstex wrote:
| I don't have to click that to know what it is.
| redsparrow wrote:
| If you haven't seen it, this is a remastered version and
| much better than the ones I remember watching ~20 years
| ago.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I got my Wikipedia chops by writing the article about
| that video. Got the Oddball Barnstar.
| sundvor wrote:
| Amazing reporting, highly enjoyed the narrative.
|
| Yes let's blow up a whale, beached as. What could possibly
| go wrong? Remains to be seen.
| drcongo wrote:
| This pun deserves all the upvotes it can get.
| dctoedt wrote:
| Upvoted _you_ , too -- I would have skimmed right by the
| (great) pun had I not noticed your comment.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Thank you. I haven't laughed that hard since the start of
| the pandemic.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Thank you, it's also a time capsule preserving the "hw"
| pronunciation of whale. (Which seems to be slowly
| disappearing.)
| finnh wrote:
| Weirdly my elementary-school-age kids were taught in
| kindergarten that "wh" is a separate sound from "w", and
| that the received pronunciation is "hw".
|
| That's in Seattle, where al of nobody does the "hw"
| thing.
|
| So that was a surprise to find in their little takehome
| pages. I'm guessing those handouts were first xerox'd 40
| years ago...
| undebuggable wrote:
| > No respectable seagull would attempt to taggle[?] [the
| particles of dead whale] anyway.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| tackle?
| jugg1es wrote:
| holy crap amazing. Why doesn't news editorialize like this
| anymore like this reporter did at the end? Simple, obvious,
| and stated fairly. You don't always need to talk to the guy
| who thought the whale hailstorm was still a good idea.
| harshreality wrote:
| Old school journalism? That kind of reporting takes too
| long -- two minutes until the event is shown -- to lay
| out the facts in a responsible way... giving everyone a
| clear idea of the initial problem, the proposed solution,
| and what the proposed solution was supposed to
| accomplish.
|
| Aside from taking too long, it fails to manipulate the
| audience by giving them a prepackaged take that aligns
| with the viewers' preconcieved bias, enrages the
| opposition, and generates audience affinity with the news
| outlet. Where's the profit in that?
| golergka wrote:
| Fits into a tik-tok limit of 3 minutes.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'm a little confused by this take: editorializing
| doesn't happen anymore, which is sad. It doesn't happen
| anymore because editorializing occurs, which is good,
| because editorializing is bad?
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| Journalism, a lost art.
| lhorie wrote:
| This is a really good example of how terrible people are at
| judging scale. Some numbers getting thrown around downthread
| say there's something to the tune of 10,000 40ft containers. To
| give a bit of a sense of perspective, that's like trying to
| clear out some 200 football fields worth of semi-trucks, except
| they are stacked, packed full of stuff, and have no gas or
| wheels. And all of them are perched atop a ship that is twice
| as tall and there's no suitable cranes or similar equipment
| anywhere near the vicinity.
|
| If you ever seen a truck up close, you probably have an idea
| how tricky it is to maneuver even a single functional one on
| open flat ground. I can't even begin to imagine what it would
| take to move off even a fraction of 10,000 equivalents of
| bricks of the size of trucks, let alone budge the massive ship
| off of the sand banks.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Another reference is that the ship is as long as the empire
| state building is tall.
| tyingq wrote:
| All true, though I imagine the plan is unloading only some of
| the containers in conjunction with dredging, pumping out
| fuel, etc. Still huge scale, but I imagine getting just one
| of the ends out of the sand would open up more options.
| [deleted]
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It probably was when it was initially built :) .
| rtkwe wrote:
| For moving containers off the best bet would probably be
| heavy lift choppers, the ship is large enough you could have
| several working on it at once and then just drop them off
| nearby to be loaded onto barges or something. A huge
| undertaking but it any weight taken off the Evergreen is less
| digging they have to do and the time is so expensive.
|
| Also it's less middle of nowhere there's a pretty large
| airbase nearby it looks like from Google Maps and a second
| smaller airport south of where Evergreen got stuck so there's
| plenty of support near.
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@30.3371843,32.2798365,3799m/dat.
| ..
| chaps wrote:
| Like the OP said, folks really aren't understanding the
| scale of this problem.. If they manage to do a single crate
| per minute, that's still just under seven days to do them
| all.
|
| An _empty_ forty foot shipping container on its own weighs
| about four tons and their max supported weight is 33.5
| tons, so the problem is somewhere in between for _every
| single container_. A Mi-26 helicopter, a "heavy transport
| helicopter" can only lift 14.5 tons, so there _will_ be
| crates that can 't be lifted.
|
| Even if it was possible, and ignoring the logistical
| issues, you can't ignore the safety issues. Doing it
| quickly across seven days is going to lead to human and
| equipment failure, and somebody's bound to get hurt or
| killed. Considering how many eyes are on this right now,
| what do you think is going to happen the first time someone
| dies?
| rocqua wrote:
| If you can get 10% of the weight down in a week, that is
| still better than not having the 10% gone. If you can do
| the helicopter offloading without blocking any other
| progress, then why not do it immediately?
| chaps wrote:
| Have a look at my other post in a sister thread.. the
| reliability of heavy lift helicopters is... garbage.
|
| Sounds like efforts are going into offloading fuel and
| water tanks while they continue to dig up sand.
| iSnow wrote:
| Uh, that's worse than I expected. The Egyptian Air Force
| has some Mil Mi-6, but their max slung load seems to be 8
| tons according to Wikipedia.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| As for the weight per container issue, I would expect the
| heavier container to be further down in the stack, for
| centre of gravity considerations, e.g. you should still
| be able to get a significant part of the load off the
| ship.
| davidgould wrote:
| The objective is to lighten the ship. Moving the light
| containers isn't optimal.
| cpcallen wrote:
| Sure, but removing two light containers is easier and
| more useful than failing to remove one heavy one.
| rtkwe wrote:
| > Considering how many eyes are on this right now, what
| do you think is going to happen the first time someone
| dies?
|
| Considering how many goods and how much money is being
| blocked up by this the response may be loud from come
| parties but I doubt governments will care enough to stop
| it.
|
| Some estimates I saw put the estimate at 10 billion
| dollars of goods being held up by the jammed ship and the
| costs of delays caused by sailing around the Cape instead
| will probably put a multiple on to that number before
| this is all over. There are construction projects in that
| corner of the globe worth far less that kill far more
| than just a few people but that hasn't really slowed them
| down much has it?
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| From a system design perspective, it's kind of nuts that
| the entire planet has only one single canal connecting
| two major bodies of water, and it's in a country with a,
| shall we say, precarious government. Surely such a single
| point of failure is a massive risk. Granted, geography
| doesn't leave us many choices, but could we at least
| build another, parallel canal to it?
| rtkwe wrote:
| The Suez is at basically the one point it makes sense to
| build it. The next closest is off the Gulf of Aqaba and
| that's right on the border of Egypt and Israel. It really
| doesn't make sense for Egypt to go through the trouble of
| cutting a second one on the one in a million shot a ship
| gets stuck like this. The usual answer is just make sure
| they don't get stuck rather than spend the billions of
| dollars cutting a second canal would cost. Even if Egypt
| was somehow charged the losses for this screw up that
| probably wouldn't be enough to make it worth cutting a
| second backup canal.
| pasttense01 wrote:
| There is another alternative: going around the southern
| tip of Africa. While this adds a couple weeks to trip
| time it also saves the massive Suez Canal transit tolls.
|
| And remember the Suez Canal was closed for 8 years after
| the 1967 Israel/Egypt war.
| https://thegamming.org/2014/08/31/how-the-closure-of-the-
| sue...
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| When it was built, the notion that the land around it
| wouldn't be a colonial possession seemed unlikely.
| chaps wrote:
| The difference would be in the hyper-visibility of the
| deaths.
|
| To show what I mean, compare the level of reporting and
| political backlash from [1], involving two construction
| workers against [2], involving 11 _other_ deaths, that
| were only revealed after an audit. Visibility matters. I
| don 't think it's unfair to say that if any deaths happen
| here that there would be _far_ more global visibility
| than [1].
|
| And besides, it's a silly armchair idea that doesn't make
| any sense whatsoever after ten minutes of scrutiny.
|
| [1] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/rio-
| cycle-path... [2]
| https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/rio-
| olympic-de...
| Yizahi wrote:
| And one per minute is wildly optimistic. I guess it would
| be more like 20 minutes per container, which will result
| in a year of offloading 24/7, which is also impossible
| due to low resource time of helicopter engines and
| airframe in general (and pilot stress too).
| overscore wrote:
| From my experience working with helicopters in the
| military, I think _that_ is wildly optimistic. Probably
| closer to 60-240 minutes to get each container even 100m
| by helicopter, with severe limits to parallel operations
| either in the air, or on the ground /water nearby.
| chaps wrote:
| Yeah, and it sounds like they can't fly that long without
| parts failure. It's hard to find thorough information on
| how long heavy lift helicopters can run for, but a new
| CH-54K only has an 88.6% reliability rate for missions
| lasting only 2.25 hours. Shit's looking bad for the
| helicopter idea. However, the current
| estimate for mission reliability is still below the
| required threshold (i.e., minimally acceptable)
| requirement. The program office reported in November 2020
| that the helicopter demonstrated an 84.5 percent
| reliability rate, which is short of the program's
| threshold requirement and below where the program office
| expected the reliability to be at this point in
| development.15 The program office projects that the
| helicopter should reach mission reliability of 88.6
| percent after operational testing.16 According to program
| officials, the main causes of the reliability shortfalls
| have been technical issues identified during
| developmental testing. For example, the reliability of
| the main gearbox has been one of the main factors
| affecting the helicopter's overall mission reliability
| metric.17 As mentioned, the program office has mitigation
| plans in place to address many of those technical issues,
| but has not yet demonstrated the required level of
| overall helicopter mission reliability.
|
| Source: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-208.pdf
| (p13/14)
| pacman2 wrote:
| "For moving containers off the best bet would probably be
| heavy lift choppers, the ship is large enough you could
| have several working on it at once a"
|
| I thought about this. I don't think a chopper can lift the
| container. Depending on the size of the containers, even
| the biggest chopper might not be enough
| https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-mi-26-helicopter-
| llft...
|
| Get the ship moving again, I think if you pull too hard, it
| may fall apart. There is no infrastructure to unload it.
|
| Gut feeling: Mount a crane on a ship and start unloading it
| to a smaller ship.
| SenHeng wrote:
| There's the crane lifting a crane lifting a crane method.
| [0]
|
| Though I suspect another problem would be getting another
| ship large enough for all those cranes and strong enough
| to support all the weight close enough to the ship
| without them damaging each other by knocking into each
| other from waves and weight movement.
|
| I also forgot about the matter of transporting those
| giant cranes onto the site. That itself would probably
| take weeks.
|
| [0]https://www.constructionjunkie.com/blog/2015/8/9/watch
| -a-con...
| pacman2 wrote:
| "Though I suspect another problem would be getting
| another ship large enough for all those cranes and strong
| enough to support all the weight close enough to the ship
| without them damaging each other by knocking into each
| other from waves and weight movement."
|
| I don't thinks this is your concern. Desperate times,
| desperate measures. Likely you would fix/attach the crane
| ship to the container ship. I am sure they are willing to
| salvage two ships at this time. The daily losses must be
| gigantic.
| perlgeek wrote:
| Ha, in the late 90s/early 00s, there was some buzz in
| Germany about building a huge freight airship:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter
|
| They went bankrupt, which is kinda sad. It had a designed
| lift capacity of 160t, so could theoretically lift several
| containers at once, given the right harness.
|
| (Of course I have no idea if it would be have been
| practical to use it to unload the containers, but the idea
| is certainly intriguing).
| andi999 wrote:
| The fundamental problem/flaw with that was when dropping
| off something you needed to somehow get a dummy load to
| not float away. (releasing the helium is not an option
| due to economical reasons)
| avidiax wrote:
| I suspect something more like they drop the containers in
| the desert. The value of the goods is irrelevant in the
| face of cutting off Europe from Asia.
| lhorie wrote:
| I'm definitely curious to see what they end up using. If
| the solution ends up involving choppers, there's obviously
| the question of tensile load specs for all the involved
| parts (the chopper itself, the cables, the containers, wind
| considerations, etc). I don't imagine they would have
| enough equipment with sufficiently large specs just laying
| around in case of an emergency like this, especially on
| such a large scale (recall we're talking about _airlifting
| truck-sized loads_ , possibly numbering in the hundreds or
| even thousands), and it's not clear to me what kinds of
| forces the choppers are designed to withstand, especially
| if we consider lateral forces due to wind or container
| geometry or whatever.
| rtpg wrote:
| I mean the boat is located 90 minutes from Cairo. It's
| not easy but Cairo has skyscrapers and a construction
| industry.
|
| Of course there is the "what is physically possible" and
| "what is politically doable" and there maybe a bit of a
| gulf there.
| yellowapple wrote:
| I mean, heavy-lifting choppers are something that I'd
| also expect the average NATO or (former) Warsaw Pact
| nation to have, and it's arguably in their best interests
| to make sure a key shipping route is operational (and in
| Egypt's best interests to accept any help possible).
|
| Hell, Israel's close by, and I'm pretty sure they've got
| this sort of airpower in droves _and_ are probably pretty
| heavily reliant on the Suez Canal; maybe instead of
| _fighting_ with Egypt the Israelis could, say, pitch in
| and foster some good will? And further, it 'll make up
| for the time when fighting between the two countries
| _caused_ a Suez Canal blockage ;)
| lhorie wrote:
| I mean, physical existence of a chopper vs its viability
| for this specific operation are very different things.
| Think of it this way: you may have a car, and you may
| even be familiar with installing and maneuvering a
| standard size tow. But that doesn't mean that I can just
| ask you out of the blue to come over and tow a prefab
| house that you've never handled before, then ask you to
| do it again a dozen times over (and on the double), and
| expect everything to go peachy.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Right, but in this context we're talking about countries
| with helicopters specifically intended to haul heavy
| things like shipping containers (and tanks, and trucks,
| and military base prefabs, and stuff). Keeping the
| analogy, it's like if you bought a Ford F-650 and your
| neighbors need help pulling some broken down semi (that's
| blocking the whole road) off the street in front of their
| house. And maybe you and your neighbor ain't on the best
| of terms, but you decide to at least offer to help
| anyway, because you need to use that street, too, and
| what was the point of buying that big pickup truck if you
| ain't gonna do truck stuff?
|
| In this case, you're Israel, your neighbor's Egypt, the
| street is the Suez Canal, the semi is a giant container
| ship, and your F-650 is about 23 CH-53-derived heavy-
| lifting helicopters.
| lhorie wrote:
| But do they actually routinely haul shipping containers
| packed to the brim? And continuously for days on end?
| There are various people in this thread saying that they
| can't, either because the specs are not up to par or
| because the stress risks rapid/early mechanical failure.
|
| Also, while we're at it w/ terrible analogies, consider
| that many people (including the CEO of the company that
| got called to clean up this mess) are saying this is
| going to take weeks. The more accurate analogy is that
| your F-650 is a dozen tugboats, the truck is not blocking
| the road, but instead sunk in a marsh an hour away from
| town (the suez sand bank), loaded w/ 10,000 50lb lead
| anvils (the containers) and all the manpower you are able
| to summon in order to move those anvils are a dozen
| highly paid software engineers (the choppers) who may or
| may not be inclined to take a week off to help you move
| the anvils off the truck, and who may or may not be
| actually physically capable of helping even if they
| wanted to spend their week hauling hundreds of 50lb
| anvils by hand. Oh, and you can't just drop anvils in the
| marsh either, even by accident, due to the risk of
| poisoning the water supply for the town. And you can't
| rule out the risk of one of the software engineers
| tripping and drowning. And you're not even sure your
| F-650 _can_ pull the truck out without tumbling it on its
| side or yanking off the front axle even if you empty it
| out completely.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| Average expected teu is 30k lbs on a ship. A 20ft
| container is already close to the redline of these
| helicopters on the average. You cant max these vehicles
| for more than an hour or so without needing repairs. A
| 40ft container cant even be considered. Nearly all
| containers are packed to the brim to ink out max goods
| shipped. The whole chopper idea is just a movie fantasy
| for this. Real life is not pleasant to armchair theory.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > Average expected teu is 30k lbs on a ship
|
| Yeah, _average_. That doesn 't mean that every container
| - or even most containers - are loaded to that weight per
| TEU. Indeed, it's highly likely that they're not; the
| heavy containers are going to be toward the bottom, and
| the lighter containers are going to be toward the top.
| And there are probably a lot more light containers than
| heavy ones, because...
|
| > Nearly all containers are packed to the brim
|
| Volumetrically, yes. Not necessarily in terms of weight.
| Indeed, unless you're shipping gold ingots or something,
| "max goods shipped" necessarily means that you're more
| likely to run into volumetric limits first.
|
| Not to mention that the max container weight in practice
| is usually a fair bit lower than the ISO spec, since
| those containers have to get to their destination - which
| means traveling on roads and railways with their own
| weight limits (both for the whole vehicle and per-axle),
| and on vehicles that themselves are part of that limit
| (and themselves have limits of their own). And further, a
| container can only have so much weight stacked on top of
| it.
|
| > Real life is not pleasant to armchair theory.
|
| Indeed it is not, which is why when it comes to the
| containers themselves I'm speaking from experience as a
| professional in the supply chain / logistics field :)
|
| (But yes, admittedly my knowledge on military helicopters
| is less substantial, so if there's someone who's _not_ an
| armchair theorist on that topic who wants to chime in,
| that 'd be most welcome)
| eptcyka wrote:
| FYI, it is in fact not necessary to start a comment with
| "I mean".
| yellowapple wrote:
| I mean, regardless of necessity it ain't like it hinders
| parsing of the comment, FYI.
| joshjdr wrote:
| Nor "FYI".
| chx wrote:
| I am afraid you underestimate the weight of those TEUs
| and overestimate the capabilities of the Sikorsky CH-53
| (which is what Israel has). That chopper has a max
| payload of 32000 lbs and a 40ft TEU has a max gross
| weight of 67500 lbs. Maybe you get lucky... but you'd
| need a lot of luck.
|
| Also, if they find this is feasible, you don't
| necessarily need Israel to get a few Sikorsky choppers
| there, at least the Incirlik air base must have some and
| the Sikorsky definitely has the operational range to
| cross over there on its own, Iran certainly has some, the
| Eisenhower last I checked a few weeks ago was near Italy
| and surely that group has at least a few Sea Dragons...
| yellowapple wrote:
| > That chopper has a max payload of 32000 lbs and a 40ft
| TEU has a max gross weight of 67500 lbs. Maybe you get
| lucky... but you'd need a lot of luck.
|
| 1. This assumes that the containers are actually loaded
| to their maximum gross weight. That doesn't seem likely;
| you're much more likely to run out of volume first - even
| if you're deliberately "optimizing" for as much weight in
| those containers as possible.
|
| 1a. This assumes that the heavy containers are at the top
| rather than the bottom, which would be backwards from how
| containers are supposed to be stacked (or even _allowed_
| to be stacked per your average safety guidelines around
| center of mass, stack limits, etc.).
|
| 2. This assumes that multiple helicopters can't work in
| tandem (which they can, from what I understand).
|
| So yeah, even if there are some containers that are too
| heavy to safely unload via helicopter, I strongly suspect
| that quite a few - most, probably - of those containers
| could be readily unloaded. And further, even if that
| ain't enough to get the ship moving again, it's at least
| a good start.
|
| > the Eisenhower last I checked a few weeks ago was near
| Italy and surely that group has at least a few Sea
| Dragons...
|
| Even better.
| overscore wrote:
| > 2. This assumes that multiple helicopters can't work in
| tandem (which they can, from what I understand).
|
| Do you mean two helicopters carrying a single slung load?
| That is not practised anywhere.
|
| Tandem loads in military terms refer to a single
| helicopter carrying two slung loads, one in front of the
| other.
|
| As far as I know, none of the helicopters mentioned above
| are rated for sling operations with 40ft containers.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I think there's a canal there, actually.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Have you ever tried to stack containers before? Or had to
| airlift something via tow on a helicopter? You can do the
| latter (I watched it happen in the military), but the
| former isn't happening from a helicopter, not into a
| floating barge anyway.
| danielheath wrote:
| There's no shortage of nearby desert not being used for
| anything else.
| lhorie wrote:
| But the final goal is to put the containers back on the
| ship after it gets unstuck, no? I imagine the point of
| the containers being on the ship in the first place is
| that there are not enough trucks on land to get the
| containers off the desert to their destinations.
| danielheath wrote:
| Right now the goal is to unblock the canal; if the entire
| cargo were lost in the process, that would be expensive,
| but I'm not confident it'd be more expensive than
| blocking shipping through for an extra fortnight.
| nerfhammer wrote:
| it follows then that we should consider blowing up the
| ship
| yellowapple wrote:
| I suspect that might very well be on the table.
|
| Hell, a big enough explosion might prevent ships from
| ever getting stuck at that spot again.
| lifeformed wrote:
| And you could recoup the costs by selling tickets to
| watch the explosion.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| @nerfhammer: Great idea, littering the canal with sharp
| debris pieces so the next ships will be torn to shreds :)
| WindyLakeReturn wrote:
| It sounded like they were intended to drop them on land,
| where one would hope no ships would be hitting them.
| 'Lost' would be referring to the likely chance that once
| put on the desert they wouldn't be retrieved.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Dredging is the easy part. Not sure how much swimming
| happens in the canal. We only have to worry about cutting
| through steel, not skin.
| vkou wrote:
| Ships traveling at 7 knots over a minefield of sunken
| containers will happily shred their steel skin.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Ideally, but the value of whatever cargo is on the ship
| is worth less than a functioning global supply chain.
|
| How the insurance would be settled would be interesting,
| I suppose it'd be the same as though the cargo was blown
| overboard.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| The ship isn't floating though, that's the problem. But
| I'd imagine it's very stable when trying to lift stuff of
| due to it being stuck.
| vanviegen wrote:
| It seems that containers may be too heavy. The most
| powerful chopper (the M-26) lifts up to 20,000kg (with most
| heavy-lift choppers probably lifting about half that),
| while some containers may wel exceed 30,000kg.
| souprock wrote:
| Wikipedia says: As of 2016, the Mi-26 still holds the
| Federation Aeronautique Internationale world record for
| the greatest mass lifted by a helicopter to 2,000 metres
| (6,562 ft) - 56,768.8 kilograms (125,000 lb) on a flight
| in 1982.
|
| That is 56.8 to 62.5 tons, depending on the type of ton.
| Lift two containers at once.
|
| Making things even easier, the shipping company knows the
| position and weight of every container. The containers
| have been carefully placed, keeping the weight low and
| spread evenly. The containers on top are the low-weight
| ones.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Two paragraphs earlier, Wikipedia states "the Mi-26 has a
| payload of up to 20 tonnes (44,000 lb)". Exceeding the
| documented maximum payload by almost a factor of 3 sounds
| like an excessive amount of overengineering, even by
| software standards. :-)
|
| You're right that most of the heaviest containers would
| be at the bottom of the stack. That's kind of a mixed
| blessing though..
| overscore wrote:
| That's at the max takeoff weight (56,000kg), including
| the weight of the helicopter, fuel, crew, etc.
|
| Depending on the temperature as the site, that could be a
| lot lower.
| [deleted]
| rdiddly wrote:
| Yep. Throw a bunch of these and a bunch of fossil fuels at
| the problem:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_S-64_Skycrane
| knz wrote:
| There are comments further down explaining how the
| containers likely weigh substantially more than the lift
| capacity of heavy lift helicopters. They'd have to
| partially unload the contents of each individual
| container first.
|
| And if you're unloading, the human labor cost to unload
| the whole container is probably cheaper than the cost of
| running a fleet of helicopters for weeks to months.
| gbin wrote:
| Or just blowing it up and push the pieces to the sides I
| would guess...
| avereveard wrote:
| Build a pyramid on top and let scavengers do their thing
| Cass wrote:
| I like this scavengers idea. How far is it to Cairo, and
| what's unemployment like after Corona killed the tourism
| industy? Unlock all the containers, tell people you're
| paying them fifteen bucks an hour to come unload, AND
| they get to keep whatever they can carry off. How many
| people can you fit on that ship at once?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I like the way you think.
|
| I'd buy a plane ticket to Suez to see that. Or even pay
| for a proper 4k stream of the event.
| sn_master wrote:
| The Skycrane helicopter that OP referred to is a true
| beast. It can lift heavy tanks and intact electricity
| towers. I won't be surprised if it gets used to lift the
| containers one-by-one.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDQrUiCd61U
| EMM_386 wrote:
| That is nowhere close to the biggest. Check out the
| Mi-26:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW_IxNLNvrY
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-26
|
| Even that is not enough. It can lift 20 tons, and the 40
| foot containers on this ship are heavier than that.
| souprock wrote:
| It can lift at least 56.8 to 62.5 tons, depending on your
| definition of tons. The heavy containers have been placed
| on the bottom of the ship for better stability, leaving
| the lightest ones on top.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| 28 tons of that is the helicopter itself though i think?
| rtkwe wrote:
| Can be heavier than that most won't be the max gross
| tonage. The biggest hurdle might be knowing which ones
| they can pick though. In not sure if the shipping company
| keeps the weights of every container on file somewhere.
| sn_master wrote:
| Wow, the Chinook looks so tiny in comparison to the
| Mi-26.
|
| 40ft container maximum weight is 67,200 lbs. Skycrane max
| payload is 20,000 lbs and Mi-26 is 44,000 lbs. But do you
| think all the containers are at max weight? The ones on
| top are the lightest and the helicopters might be able to
| help with them after all, or maybe we can find a way to
| use two helicopters per container.
|
| http://containertech.com/about-containers/40-standard-
| vs-40-...
| Toutouxc wrote:
| > or maybe we can find a way to use two helicopters per
| container
|
| Spoken like a true programmer :) That's incredibly
| difficult and dangerous.
| slifin wrote:
| Lol, Can we compose the helicopters?
| dkersten wrote:
| Split it into many micro-helicopters, each deployed and
| scaled independently?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I'm picturing a fleet of a few thousand hobbyist drones.
|
| It would sound like a massive angry swarm of bees.
| dheera wrote:
| What if they retrofitted the propeller as a winch and
| connected a steel cable?
| dahfizz wrote:
| Just dragging the ship across the sand risks damaging the
| hull and making the situation worse
| dmoy wrote:
| Not to mention dragging a 300,000,000 pound ship through
| sand is... difficult.
| dheera wrote:
| Hmm. Are there magic fish that eat sand what we could
| release down there?
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Maybe we can use pumps to inject the sand with hagfish
| slime?
| a9h74j wrote:
| Next subsidized Elon venture: _The Dragging Company_.
| yellowapple wrote:
| "It's A Real Drag(TM)"
| lhorie wrote:
| That's going to either snap the cable or damage the
| propeller. Probably both.
| 6nf wrote:
| Only about the center third of the channel is actually deep
| enough for this massive ship. Both ends of the ship is stuck in
| several meters of sand. So far they've only managed get two
| bulldozers on to try and dig it out but progress is slow.
| nate_meurer wrote:
| It's possible the excavation is exploratory in nature. It
| might be hard to know how stuck the bow is without digging a
| little.
| blhack wrote:
| Those excavators are there for show while they try to figure
| out what to do. There is absolutely no chance that 2 guys
| with excavators are going to dredge out enough of the canal
| to free the ship, and the canal authorities know this.
|
| It there was even shadow of a chance that that might work,
| then every single excavator in Northern Africa would be on
| it's way to the canal to dig it out and free the ship.
|
| In fact I'd say that if there was even a snowball's chance in
| hell that that would work, China would be airdropping
| excavators into the area as we speak.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| > In fact I'd say that if there was even a snowball's
| chance in hell that that would work
|
| Damn straight, considering the law of salvage[1]:
|
| > The law of salvage is a principle of maritime law whereby
| any person who helps recover another person's ship or cargo
| in peril at sea is entitled to a reward commensurate with
| the value of the property salved.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage
| hyperbovine wrote:
| I'm no expert but the ship does not appear to be at sea.
| One could even venture so far to say that that is the
| crux of the matter.
| adamjb wrote:
| Not an expert either but I found this:
|
| >Thus, if the ship was not a under command, unable to
| navigate or to reach port unaided, the service will be
| considered salvage even though the ship was not in
| imminent danger of destruction.
|
| >It was in the light of this that Gilmore posits that
| releasing a ship that has run aground or on reefs,
| breaching a ship to keep her from running on rock,
| raising a sunken vessel, putting out a fire, and
| recapture of a ship taken by pirates, are all salvage
| acts.
|
| _The maritime salvor as a volunteer adventurer_ ,
| Nzeribe Ejimnkeonye Abangwu, _International Journal of
| Law_ , Volume 3; Issue 5; September 2017
| demarq wrote:
| I see what you did there
| PeterisP wrote:
| Well, the law of salvage wouldn't apply since there's no
| "peril at sea" involved - the ship and its crew and its
| cargo are in no imminent danger. They are stuck, but
| there's no damage or destruction expected to them that
| would justify salvage. Losses by ship inactivity or
| blocking the channel are out of scope for salvage, since
| these are costs to someone else, and salvage law applies
| when you rescue the property of the ship owner/operator,
| it refers only to value of ship and cargo and (recently)
| environmental damage like oil spills (if it would be the
| liability of the ship operator).
| dheera wrote:
| That's not a good deal. If it was your property that was
| lost, you now have to pay full price in cash to get your
| property back?
|
| If that was the deal, forget salvaging it, just buy a new
| one with the cash instead.
|
| Just ditch the ship and buy a new one if that's the
| choice you face.
| rasz wrote:
| Oh it gets better, they could declare General Average
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_average and then
| instead of buying new one of what you lost you are
| chipping in for everyone else on board.
| fuzxi wrote:
| Commensurate means proportionate, not equivalent. A $100
| reward for rescuing a $100 billion ship is not
| commensurate, and neither is a $100 billion reward.
| dheera wrote:
| Well then what's the factor? 0.1? 0.5? 0.7?
| rocqua wrote:
| From what I recall, its 25%
| londons_explore wrote:
| Kind of amazing that in 48 hours, an event happens that
| threatens one of Egypts major income streams and political
| power sources, and the maximum they can spare is 2
| bulldozers...
|
| Like why not call in the army, rent every bulldozer in the
| district, and within 12 hours you'll have 30 on site and be
| able to move a lot of sand quickly to free it?
| SilasX wrote:
| In fairness, the US couldn't ramp up mask or ventilator
| production very fast when the coronavirus was going to tank
| the entire economy.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Well I'm sure we could have, it's just that ex-Presidente
| chose not to take that action.
| tjs8rj wrote:
| Why? Out of malice and ignorance? No other country in the
| world ramped up masks immediately. People put too much
| stock in the presidency, a position held for 8 years max,
| and too little stock in the massive systems decades, or
| hundreds+ years old with incredible inertia that are
| really responsible for 90% of what happens in the world.
| samcheng wrote:
| Taiwan, for example, definitely DID ramp up mask
| production immediately after understanding COVID-19's
| threat.
|
| https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3924318
|
| The government there commissioned a "national mask team"
| task force... so there is some credence to the "poor
| governance" argument in the US.
| balletto wrote:
| Surgical masks as noted in the article, not N-95 masks
| which require the specialized equipment and materials.
| rasz wrote:
| Just look at those idiot nerds, making surgical masks
| HAHA. They didnt get the Fauci memo about masks being
| useless
|
| https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/
|
| Deaths: 10
| samcheng wrote:
| Correct.
|
| Turns out blanketing the population with surgical masks,
| which are designed to block the sputum coughed into the
| air by a sick person, is an effective tactic against a
| respiratory disease!
| tjs8rj wrote:
| Sure, and at this same time Europe still hadn't, Nancy
| Pelosi was telling everyone to come party with her in SF
| Chinatown, Biden was still running campaign events, and
| the CDC was saying masks are ineffective.
|
| Most people didn't realize how bad covid was going to
| get, even the experts.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Nope, only Germany had the fiber machines, the reason
| they take a year to build is the global supply chain is
| so distributed, and you have to build many parts in
| series.
| imtringued wrote:
| It's almost been a year and I don't see an end for masks
| in sight (even with vaccines). Anyone who didn't put
| money into more production of masks is just greedy. It
| certainly wasn't a matter of time.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They are, it just takes a year or so to build these
| mech/chem tech ology machines when the specialized work
| force is so small and the training takes so long for
| knowledge transfer... this flows all the way down to high
| purity polypropylene sourcing itself.
| neither_color wrote:
| That's not fairness. Chinese expatriates bought up a lot
| of the world's stock of masks early on when the pandemic
| was limited to China. Also, ventilator shortages ended up
| not being a thing. Keep up. The world is not as simple as
| "America bad."
| eliseumds wrote:
| They know they have a monopoly. There are no viable
| alternative routes, so they just don't care enough.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sure there is. It's about to be busier than usual.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/nu0CNPi
| sn41 wrote:
| Historically, isn't that a "stormier" route? As the
| euphemism "Cape of Good Hope" replaced the "Cape of
| Storms".
|
| Also, I think shipping is about to get more expensive, I
| guess.
| adwn wrote:
| > _Historically, isn 't that a "stormier" route?_
|
| I'm no expert, but I think it makes a huge difference
| whether you're in a flimsy, wooden ship with even
| flimsier sails made of cloth, or in a 400m long,
| extremely massive steel vessel with a reliable internal
| combustion engine.
| ryathal wrote:
| Vs. storms at sea it's not a major difference, and if
| anything the sail boat is in better shape. The real
| advantage is accurate weather reports to avoid the worst
| of it.
| adwn wrote:
| > _if anything the sail boat is in better shape_
|
| Why? That sounds implausible. Firstly, the larger a ship,
| the less affected it is by waves. Secondly, high winds
| will shred your sails, but without sails it's hard to
| maneuver .
| londons_explore wrote:
| If I were South Africa, I would announce a tax on passing
| within 100 miles of their shore for commercial
| shipping...
| stereo wrote:
| Territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles (22 km) from
| a coastline.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_o
| n_t...
| khuey wrote:
| Also this would be innocent passage anyways.
| umanwizard wrote:
| That would be illegal and if they attempted to enforce it
| they would be engaging in piracy.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Well, that would trigger some Freedom of Navigation
| Operations.
| boc wrote:
| And that's how you'd get a nice, friendly visit from the
| Sixth Fleet.
| yellowapple wrote:
| "Knock knock. It's the United States. With huge boats.
| With guns. Gunboats."
| NickNameNick wrote:
| The US navy has a proud tradition of gunboat diplomacy
| going back at least as far as commodore Perry and the
| opening of japan.
| yellowapple wrote:
| That's indeed the reference, yep:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh5LY4Mz15o
| imtringued wrote:
| If I were South Africa I would make sure that this route
| is as attractive as possible.
| gregoriol wrote:
| It's probably not easy to dig with excavators into the
| canal: they likely won't reach far enough
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| I watch Gold Rush and one of the prospectors use a massive
| Volvo excavator that makes those two tiny ones they use in
| Suez look like tinker toys.
|
| I think they have no idea at this moment as the tugs can't
| get it done.
| tim333 wrote:
| I don't think the "2 bulldozers" was a serious plan. Just
| what they happened to have nearby where someone thought to
| give it a go.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Is it possible someone is blocking the canal on purpose?
| For some geopolitical reason maybe.
| markdown wrote:
| Maybe someone on WSB who's built up a massive short-sell
| position.
| imtringued wrote:
| Didn't most of them get in at 200-300? It's below that
| now.
| secfirstmd wrote:
| Hanlons Razor I reckon.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Yeah but still doesn't change the probability of it being
| on purpose or not.
| nullsense wrote:
| Can't stop. Won't stop. Game stop.
| Aperocky wrote:
| The (wo)man hour myth.
|
| In all fairness, all the excavator in the world probably
| won't solve the problem, because they have to sit on land,
| but the ship cuts deep.
| dahfizz wrote:
| > Like why not call in the army, rent every bulldozer in
| the district, and within 12 hours you'll have 30 on site
| and be able to move a lot of sand quickly to free it?
|
| Because that would all be a tremendous waste of money, and
| would not get the ship any closer to being free.
| TedShiller wrote:
| This ship thing is a perfect metaphor for the current US
| government.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| They need to give that canal some serious laxatives to flush
| that ship out. ;-]
|
| But seriously, it looks like dredging or a king tide will be
| needed to get that ship flushed out of there.
|
| Btw, it takes roughly 9-10 additional days to navigate a ship
| around the horn so ships would be better off steaming the long
| way around if time is critical.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Lloyd's List estimated that every day Suez is closed costs US$9
| billion ($400 million per hour).
|
| If it could be done technically and open up the canal, it would
| be cheaper for insurance companies to buy the ship, it's cargo,
| buy all nearby property and then blow the whole ship up.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Which is what fraction of what the Fed is lending. Problem
| solved.
| imtringued wrote:
| Slice the containers into three pieces. Take each piece by
| helicopter. It would probably take a month.
| sellyme wrote:
| I was wondering how far I'd have to scroll down this thread
| to get to the "does Egypt have any nukes?" solution.
| tim333 wrote:
| Nah but a US ICBM could be there in 30 min.
| a9h74j wrote:
| I haven't spotted "now you have two problems" anywhere yet.
| mrep wrote:
| That figure is for the value of goods that traverse the
| canal, not the closed cost. The canal generated 5.61 billion
| USD in 2020 [0] so it is costing them 15 million dollars a
| day in lost revenue.
|
| For the shipping companies, they can still go around Africa
| and the cost of doing that is probably only a little higher
| than paying the toll as Egypt wants to extract as much money
| as they can without pricing it over the cost of going around
| Africa otherwise the shipping companies would just do that in
| the first place.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Authority#:~:te
| xt=I....
| neither_color wrote:
| With so many ships going through every day for decades it's a
| wonder this never happened before.
| bergie wrote:
| We've had ships this big only for a few years.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| In its simplest form, Murphy's Law states: If anything can
| go wrong, it will.
| maxerickson wrote:
| From orbit.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| It makes you wonder if anyone has an old aircraft carrier
| they'd be willing to use as a battering ram. Try to hit it
| towards the bow to dislodge it.
| fogihujy wrote:
| And if that ram breaks you'll not just have a giant
| container ship stuck there, but a bloody aircraft carrier
| as well. :D
| moduspol wrote:
| Clearly that's when you send in the next aircraft
| carrier.
| playerm1 wrote:
| Newport News Shipbuilding had the old Enterprise CVN 65.
| May be slightly contaminated.
| terramex wrote:
| As this thread turned into 'post your crazy idea and get told
| why it would not work' here is my take: use powerful water
| pumps and direct streams of water to flush out the sand in
| spots where the ship rests on it and also around the bow.
|
| Something like that, but redirected under the ship:
| https://youtu.be/BIoBGZLc7wM?t=184
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| Or direct pressure up from below to liquefy the sand,
| quicksand-style.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That's probably what they will end up using, it's also the
| most compact thing they can bring to the site in short order.
| I mean companies like Boskalis and Mammoet have massive
| seaborne cranes, but it'll take a while for them to get there
| - I'm sure they're already on the way as well, in case the
| other solutions don't work or are late.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| This is the comment that proves the rule!
|
| This is such a good idea that it actually exists and works.
|
| Look up water injection dredging.
| Animats wrote:
| That's very likely to be used, probably in conjunction with
| the suction dredge already brought in. Using compressed air
| or water to push around the sand you want to dredge is
| quite common. Sometimes ships have been un-stuck from mud
| by injecting compressed air near the hull to break them
| free of suction.
|
| As a salvage job, this isn't that bad. No waves, a good
| climate, easy land and water access, hull intact, on an
| even keel, no leaks. It's just big.
|
| If you want to waste time on this, look up the AIS data for
| all the big dredges and cranes Boskalis and Smit own, and
| see what's moving towards the Med. Here's the Boskalis
| dredger fleet.[1] If those guys decide to move sand, sand
| will be moved.
|
| Smit's ships include the Smit Borneo, which is a crane ship
| big enough to take containers off a large container ship.
| It's done that before.[2] If they have to partially unload
| the ship in place, it can be done. Not all that fast, but
| it will get done.
|
| Here's a Smit container removal job from a smaller ship,
| but one in much worse condition.[3]
|
| Those guys do a lot of planning and modeling first. The
| idea is not to make things worse.
|
| [1] https://boskalis.com/about-us/fleet-and-
| equipment/dredgers.h...
|
| [2] https://photos.marinetraffic.com/ais/showphoto.aspx?pho
| toid=...
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0ZSdVGLj-Y
| m4rtink wrote:
| That's actually even a technique that has been used in these
| places in the past - Egypt used it when attacking Israeli
| fortifications on one of the banks during one of the
| conflicts in the past, just washed them away so they could
| cross with less resistance.
| NickNameNick wrote:
| I wonder if a modified jet boat could work? A bit like those
| flying platforms that are built as a hose connected to the
| output of a jetski.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Could you build a temporary barrier around the ship and the
| section of the canal, bring in some massive pumps, and
| temporarily raise the water level around the ship?
|
| Edit: Something like this
| https://www.hydrologicalsolutions.com/aqua-barrier-cofferdam...
| nhoughto wrote:
| Imagine the pressures on the temporary barrier too, and what
| a failure would mean. Even bigger disaster.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The pressure on the hypothetical levee wouldn't be much
| since we're only talking about a couple dozen feet of water
| depth. (Yes, some jerk is going to come along and calculate
| out that that's an impressive amount of total force and act
| like that's a big deal but it's not really that impressive
| when you've got a huge amount of material to spread it out
| over).
|
| Digging out around the ship is going to be much less work
| because of the amount of material you'll need to move and
| how far you'll need to move it.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Hey, that's an _incredible_ amount of force, it 's too
| risky, not to mention it will impact the local ecosystem,
| and uh, stuff!
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Regardless, removing cargo and/or dredging around the
| ship is gonna be tons (literally) less work (literally).
| bbarnett wrote:
| A dual approach might be to dig around, but just place
| the dirt in preparation for a temporary levy scenario.
|
| So much cash burned per hour, a fallback wouldn't hurt,
| and secondary backhoes could be used, so the primaries
| don't slow down in their primary task, dredging.
|
| Of course, I bet someone is, even now, trying to reduce
| costs, not caring that even an hour or two will wipe out
| all savings.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| That is an engineer's job, of course, to match project
| outcomes to schedule and cost.
|
| An atom bomb would certainly clear the canal, but what of
| the cost?
| Aeolun wrote:
| A failure would mean all the water bursts out and the ship
| is stuck again. I don't see how that would set us back
| much?
| [deleted]
| TylerE wrote:
| The spot where the ship is abuts to a town with a 750k
| pop. There are residential neighborhoods directly
| adjacent to the canal.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Ah, yeah. Given the location I think the original plan is
| already a bit hard to execute, even without the flood
| risk.
| rapnie wrote:
| In the middle parts of the ship it is probably not grounded,
| so you might have ropes below the hull with large inflatable
| balloons on both sides below water level, to give the ship
| extra lift. Then on a high tide, with oil & water removed,
| maybe some dredging on the sides where it needs to rotate to,
| and.. go!
| asmithmd1 wrote:
| Lets say they cabled a Goodyear blimp to each side of the
| ship One Goodyear blimp is about 5,000 m^3 and a meter^3 of
| seawater is about a ton, so that gives us 10,000 tones of
| lifting force!.
|
| The ship weighs 220,000 so it will be riding about 4.5%
| higher in the water. The main channel is very narrow. Its
| bow is buried about 20m deep and 100m into the shallow
| bottom outside of the channel. They are not going to lift
| it out.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Now I want a giant sci-fi blimp to swoop in and lift it
| up.
| EpicOne4223 wrote:
| Someone get the old man and that little boy scout from Up
| on the phone, stat!
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| As the proud father of a toddler my first thought was
| "somebody call the paw patrol"
| jeffrallen wrote:
| "Zuma, I'm going to need your boat, and Sky, I'm going to
| need you to unload containers onto Zuma. Paw Patrol,
| let's go!"
| christophilus wrote:
| I went to Bob the Builder. That dude can fix it.
| lizzard wrote:
| I totally came here to suggest huge balloons!
| rektide wrote:
| /larry ellison flies in & starts using his fuel cell
| zeppelin to save the day
| wongarsu wrote:
| Maybe something like those air/water tanks they attached to
| the side of the Costa Concordia to float it [1].
|
| But you would have to take great care to prevent it from
| rolling over, so you probably can't lift it up too far.
|
| 1: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28288823
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| Just so everyone is clear: The company that handled the
| salvaging of the Costa Concordia is the company that is
| handling the salvaging of this ship. Same exact people!
| You can bet that they are going to be doing the best
| thing that can be done.
| pasttense01 wrote:
| Yes, but remember how long the Costa Concordia salvage
| took:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Concordia_disaster#Sa
| lva...
| achow wrote:
| Using the same Concordia techniques maybe SMIT Salvage
| would float Evergreen to 'loosen' it a bit out of sand,
| loosen further by dredging, and then when high tide comes
| [1], Evergreen would be able to turn around with help of
| tug boats.
|
| [1] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/best-shot-at-
| unblocking-suez...
| achow wrote:
| [1] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/best-shot-at-
| unblocking-suez...
| fallingknife wrote:
| And if you want to know more about the Costa Concordia:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh9KBwqGxTI
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| That would take weeks-to-months. It's faster to dredge around
| it with a mobile barge.
| brown9-2 wrote:
| the land around the canal looks pretty flat, those would have
| to be very strong barriers
| fileeditview wrote:
| I've had the exact same idea but the canal bank is very
| shallow.. so you would have to build around the whole ship
| (as you said). This also seems like a major undertaking.
|
| I am excited to see how they will solve the problem though!
| wongarsu wrote:
| If the bank is very shallow and mostly sand, maybe instead
| of building a damn all around the ship it would be easier
| to just dredge a new passage that goes around the stuck
| ship. After all the real problem isn't that the ship is run
| aground, it's that the canal is blocked for everyone else.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I'd think that rather than dredge enough sand/dirt to
| create a completely new channel, it'd be easier to dredge
| out enough next to the ship to free it. They should only
| need to dredge out the bow and stern, the middle of the
| ship is already in deeper water.
| TylerE wrote:
| If would be a very long diversion. The turning radius of
| large ships is, well, astronomical, we're talking miles.
|
| The canal itself is MASSIVE - 79ft deep and 700ft wide -
| and if you're turning you'd need to be wider still. We're
| talking about removing absolutely massive amounts of
| material.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Well, they did it before, and without the help of the
| massive diggers we have currently, so it can't be _that_
| hard, relatively speaking.
|
| Besides, my newspaper said that the economic losses of
| the stuckness amount to like 400M per hour. That is a
| looot of money you can throw at a problem.
| nostrademons wrote:
| The Suez Canal took 10 years to build, with > 30,000
| people working on it at any given time and over 1.5M
| total laborers, thousands of whom died.
|
| I don't think we want to be waiting for 10 years. Cheaper
| to blow up the ship and its cargo than to re-build a
| whole new canal.
| TylerE wrote:
| Blowing it up isn't really a solution either, that still
| leaves the canal blocked, as it was for 8 years after the
| 6 day war.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Fleet
| nostrademons wrote:
| I was being semi-facetious, but now I see that a bunch of
| people seem to be suggesting that in all seriousness.
| Poe's Law strikes again.
| ReflectedImage wrote:
| Actually with a well placed nuclear warhead placed
| directly under the ship, it could be thrown out of the
| canal and into the nearby desert clearing the canal route
| /s
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| Fun fact: the ship is larger than the fireball of a
| peacekeeper warhead would be (~320 meters)
| playerm1 wrote:
| May want to use two of those bad boys then
| lazide wrote:
| Those were what, 300kiloton's ish? So if we go to 1+
| megaton we'd be good. Seems reasonable if we go up to 3-4
| megatons, maybe we'd even end up with a big enough crater
| one of these ships could pull a three point turn next
| time?
| arethuza wrote:
| A better way would be to explode one medium sized nuke
| under the ship, wait a few seconds then explode another
| and then start exploding nukes behind it until it's going
| fast enough.
|
| Project Orion did contemplate a 400m _diameter_ ship
| weighing 8 million tons....
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_prop
| uls...
| aww_dang wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
|
| >Proposed uses for nuclear explosives under Project
| Plowshare included widening the Panama Canal,
| constructing a new sea-level waterway through Nicaragua
| nicknamed the Pan-Atomic Canal, cutting paths through
| mountainous areas for highways, and connecting inland
| river systems.
| gpvos wrote:
| Okay, something like the Tsar Bomba then? /s
| concordDance wrote:
| I suspect any nuke smaller than the Tsar Bomb would leave
| top large pieces in the way.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Think outside the box some more. With enough nuclear
| warheads, trade between Asia and Europe can be made
| completely irrelevant!
| cesarb wrote:
| > The turning radius of large ships is, well,
| astronomical, we're talking miles.
|
| But do the ships actually have to turn? As long as they
| are floating instead of stuck in the sand, can't they be
| dragged sideways, either by tugboats or by stationary
| winches on land?
|
| Of course, the ships would have to stop first, which
| would take miles of slowing down, and it would probably
| still be faster to fully dig the stuck ship out of the
| sand than to dig a diversion channel.
| TylerE wrote:
| The existing canal is largely straight, so any detour
| would inevitably involve at least 3 turns..
| sliken wrote:
| or just 1.
| kbenson wrote:
| > The turning radius of large ships is, well,
| astronomical, we're talking miles.
|
| That's when under speed. If these ships don't have the
| unidirectional port engines like cruise ships do for
| maneuvering in tight spots (and they may not, I don't
| know), in this situation they would likely use tugboats
| for turning. That's what they're for.
|
| That doesn't necessarily make a diversion feasible, but I
| don't think whether it's feasible or not rests on whether
| these ships can turn. That's really not the problem as I
| see it.
| TylerE wrote:
| If with a zero turn radius, these ships are in excess of
| 1000ft long...you need a lot of clearance and a large
| radius just because of the physical dimensions (and so
| you know, we don't get a _second_ ship wedged sideways in
| the canal.
| kbenson wrote:
| We're talking about digging a diversionary channel.
| Making either end of that where it connects to the
| current channel wider to accommodate turning is trivial
| in comparison.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| If you're talking about digging a diversionary channel,
| then why not just dig around the boat with the same
| equipment?
|
| Excavate sand around + weight from ship pancakes sand its
| sitting on, gradually = ship lowers back to floating
| depth
| TylerE wrote:
| Probably very complicated since you couldn't have people
| in close. What if, as is not unlikely, part of the bank
| suddenly crumbles and the boat shifts?
|
| Also, I doubt the sand goes down very deep...this is a
| costal area, not rolling dunes. You're going to hit rock
| quickly.
| [deleted]
| richardfey wrote:
| And then some other ship would get stuck while turning?
| dlgeek wrote:
| They're called azipods.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia page for this ship
| says it does have two 2500kW bow thrusters. I imagine if
| they were worth much in this situation we wouldn't be
| talking about them, though.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_Given
| TylerE wrote:
| For fluid dynamic reasons those sort of thrusters are
| only effective when the ship is stationary
| occamrazor wrote:
| Well, at the moment the ship is _very_ stationary.
| tim333 wrote:
| Looking it up a 2500kW bow thruster gives a thrust of
| about 30 tons (https://www.thrustmaster.net/tunnel-
| thrusters/electric-motor...)
|
| which is not going to do much here. It seems the trouble
| with a lot of solutions - the tugs can probably tug with
| a force of something like 600 tons combined but the ship
| weights 220,000 tons which is like putting a force of 5kg
| on a 2 ton car which is stuck. Probably not going to
| budge it.
|
| Really you want something which will shove it with a
| force maybe 10% of the weight, say 20,000 tons but there
| don't seem to be many of those lying around.
|
| I wondered if they tied a cable from the ship to one of
| the other large ships nearby and fired up the main
| engines if that could do something?
| Alupis wrote:
| Dredge a new passage? These ships do not turn on a dime,
| it would have to be started way before this blockage, and
| end way after the blockage so that the entry and exit are
| shallow enough of an angle for even the largest ships to
| handle with easy.
|
| You're basically asking why can't they just make a whole
| new canal in less than a week?
| jacquesm wrote:
| You might end up getting it stuck _higher_. Then what?
| imperfectcats wrote:
| Then that is tomorrow me's problem!
|
| I honestly think a lot of thinking works that way, where
| we'll let tomorrow me worry about it. To be fair, a lot
| of the time it makes sense. The problems a solution
| creates are things we need to accept when alternative is
| worse (think global warming vs starvation circa 1770).
| jacquesm wrote:
| I honestly think that if you are involved in an operation
| like this and you bring this attitude to work that you'll
| be fired before the day is out.
|
| This is the kind of job you want to get right the first
| time.
| greymalik wrote:
| Build a _taller_ barrier!
| aaron-santos wrote:
| If it keeps getting stuck higher and higher at some point
| it will be out of the canal thus solving the problem, no?
| tillinghast wrote:
| Plus: free bridge!
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| if we keep going then the other ships can just duck.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Submarine container ships or an underpass would be cool.
| souprock wrote:
| No, just change the density. The oil industry uses cesium
| formate. It's relatively non-toxic. The brine can have
| density of 19.2 pounds per gallon. (2.3 grams/mL)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium#Petroleum_exploration
| [deleted]
| mig39 wrote:
| Coincidence ... my town is actually installing these in
| anticipation of a Spring flood.
|
| Here's a drone video I took today!
|
| https://youtu.be/JRe2a-zHDbg
|
| I didn't realize they were water-filled!
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Nice video, thanks for sharing. We shall defeat the water,
| with water! :D
| rblatz wrote:
| I'm not at all qualified on these matters, but that's one of
| the better ideas I've read.
| [deleted]
| reader_x wrote:
| Could the containers themselves be used to help create such a
| temporary barrier?
| m4rtink wrote:
| Wow that link - well thats a clever system! I would have
| never come up with something like that yet it's so simple in
| hindsight!
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| If you unload 20,000 TEU's onto rail cars it takes 5000 cars,
| double-stacked. That's 50 100-car trains. It'll take weeks to
| months to load and unload all that, if a proper rail depot is
| available to take it. It takes huge cranes to reach across a
| megaship and into its hold. That'd have to be build. On sand.
|
| The idea that there's any quick way to manage the cargo of this
| ship is whistling in the dark.
| carbonx wrote:
| I think the idea is that they would only partially unload.
| Get enough weight off the bow to help move it out.
| passer_byer wrote:
| I agree with your reasoning here. I'm genuinely interested in
| your interpretation of the idiom, "whistling in the dark".
|
| I have heard this as, "whistling in the wind", taken to imply
| sound waves are distorted by wind patterns since sound waves
| use air molecules for conveyance. Whistling into the wind
| would tend to dampen sound waves intended for up-wind
| listners. Whereas, whistling with the wind tends to cause a
| whistle with the same decibel level as the into-the-wind
| variety to travel a bit further to down-wind listners.
|
| How would the medium of light impact travel distance of sound
| waves? Or is there a cultural reference here that is
| different for me as a American english speaker?
| emberfiend wrote:
| Two different idioms, both fairly widely used (not sure
| about US vs non-US, but I've heard both as a non-American).
|
| 'Whistling in the wind' is about futility. A whistle is
| inaudible in the face of a massive elemental force like
| wind. "The lone excavator pushed on the hull of the
| colossal container ship, but it was whistling in the wind."
|
| 'Whistling in the dark' is about presenting a brave face in
| an intimidating situation: a nonchalant whistle in fear-
| inducing darkness. "They confidently claimed the ship would
| be moved in two days, I knew they were whistling in the
| dark."
|
| If you care about understanding people and being
| understood, simply looking up idioms is way more effective
| than trying to construct meaning from physical principles.
| Just a thought :)
| rjsw wrote:
| Why do they need to be put on rail cars ? Unload them onto
| the sand next to the canal.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| After you hit the limit of the crane reach, where does the
| next one go? Stacking on unstable sand seems a bad choice.
| So maybe 10% can be unloaded and just set on the ground.
| After that, they have to be moved somewhere.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Cranes on barges or ships, unloading the cargo into other
| ships is probably the most viable way to unload any
| significant amount of cargo.
| movedx wrote:
| Couldn't we just place dynamite near the front and use the
| explosion to push the ship off the sand/rocks and back into the
| water?
|
| ...
|
| /s
| jacobr1 wrote:
| It is really pretty amazing that this hasn't happened with more
| frequency in the past.
| Parzival99 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Though, to be fair, even the CEO of Flexport initially
| dismissed this, saying "I assume they'll have it fixed in a day
| or two. And anyways there's such a backlog of ships waiting to
| unload at the ports of arrival that it probably won't even
| impact the transit times of the cargo."
| https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1374501965418352640
| xwdv wrote:
| This ship is delaying $400 million dollars per hour in global
| trades.
|
| It better not fucking take weeks.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Or what?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Well, there's always the option of just demolishing the
| ship and its cargo, getting everything out of the canal
| without worrying about whether any of it survives the
| process.
|
| That would still be expensive, but is it more expensive
| than blocking the canal?
| nashalo_nighly wrote:
| Before destroying the ship you would need to pump out all
| the fuel which can take a very long time in itself
| suresk wrote:
| How do you destroy a 1300 ft ship with 20k+ TEUs of cargo
| on it? How do you then clean all of the debris out of a
| pretty narrow and shallow canal so that other ships can
| go through again?
|
| I can't imagine that being a very quick thing to do.
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Call the Israelis, they have nukes. Obviously, Suez needs
| to be made deeper and wider at this point anyway
| neither_color wrote:
| You joke, but this isn't the first time someone's
| considered nuking Egypt's desert to build a canal.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t3X7tUTk5o
| rsj_hn wrote:
| I came to this purely to do a CTRL+F "explosion" and was
| dismayed to see all the comments proposing it voted down,
| whereas comments proposing things like balloons being
| used to lift the boat were not voted down.
|
| Clearly demolition is one of the things to consider in
| this scenario, and is at least as realistic as the
| million-luftballons. It would also make for some fun
| conversation.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >How do you destroy a 1300 ft ship with 20k+ TEUs of
| cargo on it?
|
| A smaller less stuck ship or barge you don't care very
| much about full of explosives.
|
| And you don't need to destroy the whole thing, just shred
| and distribute the part that's in the canal enough that
| it's no longer an impediment to navigation. Sure you
| might be left with 30 big chunks but 30 big chunks can be
| picked up with conventional marine construction
| equipment. If the bulbous bow is still buried in the sand
| then whatever, you don't care.
|
| We're talking about a Mont-Blanc sized explosion here.
| Definitively messy but with modern engineering I think
| you could whip up a directed blast that ensures the task
| is accomplished without unnecessarily digging a hole or
| some other dumb side effect.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| It's still easier to dislodge a giant ship in one piece
| than it is to remove one giant ship's worth of random
| metal shrapnel from a narrow, shallow canal.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Who said anything about shrapnel? There's another comment
| in the thread making the case that "we don't want to just
| tug harder on the boat, because that might tear a hole in
| the hull". That could destroy the boat, but... so what?
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > That could destroy the boat, but... so what?
|
| Because then you'd still have to remove everything, but
| now you don't have one big, controllable system, but you
| have lots of pieces that will move in unpredictable ways.
|
| The canal is shallow and narrow, and gravity isn't
| working in your favor here. A ship has a natural tendency
| to float (even if it currently isn't). Pieces of debris
| don't. You will have to remove all pieces that break off,
| one-by-one.
| [deleted]
| chki wrote:
| Because if you destroy the boat and it sinks that will
| make the passage unusable for a long time? I mean
| currently it seems possible to drag the ship out of this
| problem but if it's no longer floating you might need to
| start sawing it into pieces like this example of the
| sunken Tricolor https://youtu.be/0ENOJBLVgjw . That will
| take months and will have a serious global economic
| impact.
| ignoramous wrote:
| ...or 24h * 7d * 2w * 400 million = 134 billion USD.
|
| Sounds like a _lot_ of money, if GP 's right?
| umanwizard wrote:
| NB: 400M is the normal throughput, not the loss while
| closed. It would only be the total loss while closed if
| all those goods somehow vanished.
| oAlbe wrote:
| Is there a chance the ship could tip over in some type of
| manouver, considering it's stuck both at the front and the
| back?
| Aperocky wrote:
| How it gets from bad to worse..
|
| Realistic headline: As more of the bow and stern are freed
| from sand, ship suddenly lists and dumps 5000 containers into
| the canal.
| macintux wrote:
| Apparently, if you unload containers without sufficient care,
| there's even a chance the ship could break in half.
|
| That would obviously be catastrophic.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Probably
| Zenst wrote:
| > It's really stuck. It's probably going to take a couple of
| weeks to get it unstuck.
|
| My armchair engineering would dump a load of salt into the
| water to increase buoyancy of the ship long enough for the tugs
| to get some momentum with less effort than currently.
|
| That would be my cheap try solution to help the tugs that have
| already hit there limit so why not change the physics and add a
| load of salt.
| throwaway41597 wrote:
| wouldn't too much salt damage the ship/make it rust?
| totalZero wrote:
| You could increase the buoyancy by something like 230
| kilograms per cubic meter if you fully saturate it on a hot
| day, but I suppose you'd have to dam up both sides to keep
| the brine from washing away.
| MrOwen wrote:
| Would that level of salinity be harmful once it reaches the
| sea?
| nashalo_nighly wrote:
| Yes since the salinity transfer from the canal into the
| Mediterranean Sea is already enough to make species from
| the Red Sea colonize the east Mediterranean. The Aswan
| dam reduced further the amount of freshwater coming to
| the area. So I would guess adding more salt wouldn't be
| too good for the eastern Mediterranean.
| totalZero wrote:
| Assuming you narrowly dam up the canal near the ship to
| contain the brine, no I don't think so. Seawater is 3%
| saline and saturated brine is 26% saline, so you'd
| probably have sufficient mixing within the canal itself
| once you open the dams. The canal is 120 miles long and I
| can't imagine you'd dam up more than a third of a mile at
| maximum. But it would take a whole hell of a lot of salt.
| Zenst wrote:
| At this scale, even air pressure would be a factor, I'd
| presume a higher air pressure would be more conducive as
| large surface area of the water than the ship, though might
| be wrong.
| [deleted]
| barbegal wrote:
| And how much salt would you need? At least 100kg per m3.
| Assuming the canal is 250m wide you need a 400m section
| dammed and average depth is 15m then you need 150 thousand
| tonnes of salt. Thankfully Egypt produces more than 3 million
| tonnes of salt per year so just a few weeks worth of
| production and enough to fill a large bulk carrier ship.
| Zenst wrote:
| I was thinking a few lorry loads on the edge they are
| trying to pull, just to give it a kick briefly so the tugs
| can get that initial momentum going. More of a brief sudden
| kick/change to give it that edge.
|
| With that I don't think with the whole damming of aspect
| would be any better than damming of and pumping water in.
| Also with that scale you run the risk when you breach the
| dam of causing what I'd call a saline tsuanmi which might
| not work well for the ships in it's path and may well cause
| another to get stuck.
|
| So, more a form of quick kick to aid in getting the tugs an
| initial bite and a quick dislodge, however small, would
| only help and may well tip the balance.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > a few lorry loads on the edge they are trying to pull
|
| My intuition is that at the scale of ship, and the canal,
| "a few lorry loads" is not going to have any noticeable
| effect.
| nate_meurer wrote:
| The ship weighs roughly 100,000 tons. I very large lorry
| might be five tons. Factor in the static friction of the
| ship's keel stuck in mud, and the suction opposing any
| movement.
|
| For kick of initial momentum, I suggest nuclear weapons.
| nate_meurer wrote:
| Actually, double that weight. The ship weighs well over
| 200,000 tons.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > It's probably going to take a couple of weeks to get it
| unstuck.
|
| You're an optimist, that's for sure.
| leesec wrote:
| Dumb question but what about heavy lift helicopters moving
| containers off 1 by 1?
| michaelt wrote:
| It has 20,000 TEUs (twenty-foot-container-equivalent-units).
|
| Weight-wise, the _average_ container could be lifted with a
| military heavy lift helicopter: The ship carries 20,000 tons,
| i.e. 1 ton per TEU, and a CH-47F can lift 11 tons. Although a
| TEU can weigh up to 26 tons, so you couldn 't lift the
| heaviest ones.
|
| The problem is speed: A ship-to-shore crane at a properly
| equipped port can do a lift every 2 minutes. Ports can speed
| things up by lifting several TEUs in a single lift - but
| you'd also expect a helicopter to be slower, because we
| haven't put decades of optimisation into the process. So
| let's assume those cancel each other out.
|
| If they can keep up that rate with a helicopter, and they
| operate 24 hours a day, it would take 28 days to unload the
| ship.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Why is everyone assuming that we can do only one container
| at once? The ship is long, at least few can be done in
| parallel.
| michaelt wrote:
| Outside of Vietnam war movies, it's very unusual to see
| helicopters flying in close proximity.
|
| I suppose it's possible you could find a bunch of pilots
| confident in cargo handling, landing on ships, and close
| formation flight all at once. Or that the ship is large
| enough the helicopters would practically be independent
| of one another?
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| It's a lot of containers.
| cozzyd wrote:
| docker-compose down ?
| leesec wrote:
| You don't need to remove all of them? Just get it light
| enough to float it?
| PeterisP wrote:
| Removing 10% of containers by helicopter also would take
| unreasonable time, removing 1% of containers might be
| plausible but I don't think it would make enough of a
| difference to justify the risks.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Helicopters also have limited capacity. So it's not like
| you could pick up the heaviest first. Which brings back
| the issue of sheer quantity.
| londons_explore wrote:
| it's a quarter mile long. You can probably have 10
| helicopters working at once while still keeping safe
| distances.
|
| Each helicopter has a crew of 4 on the boat and 4 on the
| shore. They hook 4 chains to the 4 corner hoists of each
| container. Say it takes 1 minutes per container to affix
| the chains, 1 minute to fly to the sand, 1 minute to
| unhitch, and 1 minute to fly back. Thats a lot slower than
| agricultural helicopters, but nobody will be very practiced
| with this yet, so it'll be slower.
|
| The entire ship could be unloaded with this method in 5.5
| days. Perhaps less if not all the cargo needs unloading.
|
| The job could be half done by now...
| yongjik wrote:
| You're joking, right? It's a quarter mile, or 400m long.
| Ten helicopters in it means ~40m distance. That's less
| than safe distance _between cars_ in a highway.
| totalZero wrote:
| You're assuming that the helicopters approach
| simultaneously instead of staggering themselves out.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| The worlds highest capacity heavy lift chopper (M-26, of
| which there are 20 operational) has a max take off weight
| of 44k lbs. A standard 40 ft. container can be loaded to
| a gross weight of 66k lbs.
|
| It takes a purpose built crane a few minutes to unload a
| container, so I sort of doubt a helicopter could make it
| happen faster.
| zokier wrote:
| Mi-26 has record of 56 tons lifted:
| https://www.fai.org/record/2174
|
| Although I suspect you don't want to repeat that trick
| too many times without serious inspection/maintenance.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The Mi-26 is still in production, so you could replace
| them with brand new ones outright.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| A quarter of a mile long is a huge ship. Damn. Never
| really got that until now.
| mahathu wrote:
| Coincidentally a quarter of a mile (400m) is also the
| length of those oval tracks around soccer fields in
| Europe. we used to run on them a lot in PE back in high
| school.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Same in the US for the tracks surrounding football fields
| (and soccer fields too, for that matter).
| cm2012 wrote:
| About the height of the empire state building
| kergonath wrote:
| It's really tall as well. You can't take any quickly
| assembled crane to unload that.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Or, depending on how quick it really is, it could take
| months. Its easy to arm-chair speculate.
| faldstool wrote:
| Containers are apparently quite heavy. No helicopter
| currently in production can lift the weight of a fully loaded
| container on its own. https://www.aerotime.aero/27542-Could-
| helicopters-solve-the-...
| gizmo385 wrote:
| Based on the information on Wikipedia, it sounds like the
| ship could potentially hold more than 20,000 containers.
| Assuming I'm understanding the article correctly, that'd be a
| lot of containers to move 1-by-1.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| If it's fully loaded, that'd be something like ten _thousand_
| 40 ' containers to move.
|
| Hooking them up to a helicopter would be a slow, dangerous
| process as well.
| 6nf wrote:
| The biggest choppers in the world can only lift about 20
| tonnes. 20 foot containers max gross is 25 tonnes, and 40
| foot containers even more.
| gm3dmo wrote:
| Typically an empty 20 foot shipping container weighs
| between 1.8-2.2 metric tonnes (about 3,970 - 4,850 lb) and
| an empty 40 foot shipping container weighs 3.8 - 4.2 tonne
| (8,340 - 9,260 lb) depending on what kind of container it
| is. For example, high cube containers tend to be heavier.
| blhack wrote:
| Why would these containers be empty?
| rjsw wrote:
| They might be empty if it had been going the other way
| through the canal.
| eCa wrote:
| Yes, especially with the container shortage[1] reported
| earlier this week, I would be very surprised if empty
| containers are being sent _away_ from where there already
| is a shortage.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26574077
| blhack wrote:
| There are 20,000 containers on the ship. Assuming you needed
| to remove 1/4 of those containers to get it to rise far
| enough to get off of the sand, you need to move 5000
| containers.
|
| Assume that it takes 5 minute to connect a bridle to a
| container, hook it to a helicopter, and move it...and then
| also assume that the helicopters can run 24/7 and never have
| to refuel, that they can hot swap in pilots, and that there
| is never a single problem, you're talking about 25000
| minutes, or about 17 days of absolutely non stop running
| helicopters.
|
| And that only gets you 1/4 of the containers, and it might
| not even work at all.
|
| (It's not a dumb question, and I'm sure that it was already
| discussed by the team who is dealing with this. It's just
| that the scale of what is happening here is restrictive.)
| jeffgreco wrote:
| How many copters are you assuming?
| kergonath wrote:
| We really are bad at dealing with large numbers. 20 000
| does not seem that much when it's just written that way.
| Even looking at the pictures, this is a lot of containers,
| but the efforts needed to get them out of that ship are
| hard to imagine.
| bkor wrote:
| Just a small correction: 20.000 TEU is not the same as the
| amount of containers. TEU is the number of twenty foot
| equivalent. There will be enough 40 foot containers on
| there. If it was going to Europe there will hardly be any
| empty containers.
|
| Amount of actual containers is probably the 20.000 divided
| by 1.6 or so, though it's not a given that any vessel is
| fully loaded to max capacity. Sometimes need to deal with
| restrictions.
| Alupis wrote:
| The weight is more of an issue. Heavy lift helis cannot
| lift a fully loaded 20ft container (weighing up to
| 67,000lbs), let alone a 40 footer.
| souprock wrote:
| "up to"
|
| Those heavy ones would be evenly distributed in the
| bottom of the hold, down below the water line. Low-weight
| ones are on top, for ship stability.
| gizmo385 wrote:
| You'd also need a helicopter than can lift containers that
| heavy, which might be a long shot.
| neogodless wrote:
| Just going off "count the candy in the jar" math from this
| image: https://static.vesselfinder.net/ship-
| photo/9811000-353136000...?
|
| It appears to be roughly 7 x 20 x 25 containers, or 3500...
| (height x width x length.)
|
| EDIT: Freezing this video I got a better view of how it's
| stacked today. I'm sure this is imperfect, like I said
| trying to count candy in a jar. But I'm curious what the
| real number of containers is!
|
| H X W X L
|
| 10 X 23 X 25 ~= 5750
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-suezcanal-
| ship/beac...
| mattashii wrote:
| Your height number is off by a factor of 2; a significant
| factor of container storage on these large container
| ships is below the deck. It isn't uncommon for these
| large ships to have 9 to 12 containers stacked on top of
| eachother before the stack reaches above the deck and
| becomes visible from the side.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| The ship is 400 meters long, you can take off multiple
| containers in parallel along the ship. I'd guess 4 at once.
| nullsense wrote:
| Multithreading!
| mark_mart wrote:
| Don't forget that you need to put containers back. Same or
| more effort needed.
| lolc wrote:
| They don't have to put them back.
| WJW wrote:
| Most heavy lift helicopters don't really go above 20 tons
| takeoff weight, while even a 20 foot container has a max
| allowable weight well above that. Most shipping containers
| will the 40 footers, so helicopters will probably be a no-go.
| There's also 20k of them so it would take quite a while.
|
| That said, taking off some containers is a viable option but
| it'll probably have to wait for a crane ship to arrive.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| >Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think
| you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship.
| You're basically asking to build a port in the middle of the
| egyptian desert. That isn't going to happen.
|
| I say build a trebuchet on deck and start launching containers
| into the desert.
| Treblemaker wrote:
| Oh, so that's what this was about...
|
| http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/the-dirt-
| dances....
| jebeng wrote:
| This is the way.
|
| Just check the contents first so there's nothing really
| harmful inside.
|
| Also start scaling up to multiple trebuchets as soon as
| possible and make it rain.
|
| Stimulate the local economy via job creation for the clean
| up.
|
| Monetize the live stream too.
|
| The trebuchet will save the global supply chain thanks to
| you.
| gst wrote:
| > Monetize the live stream too.
|
| Don't forget to sell the containers as NFTs.
| snewman wrote:
| Now Flinging TEUs
| bamboozled wrote:
| Would it not be easier to use Chinooks to remove cargo ?
| avs733 wrote:
| Empty weight of a 40ft ISO is around 3,700kg Max weight of
| a container loaded is around 30,000kg
|
| Max payload of a Chinook around 11,000 kg near sea level at
| not high temp. (correct my number here from the wrong
| version of the Chinook...older versions were 4,500kg)
|
| So, if your container is a a quarter full, sure
| coolspot wrote:
| Okay, bring Mi-26 then.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-26
| zhte415 wrote:
| I am astounded that, from the link you provided, it can
| take 60 stretchers.
| animal531 wrote:
| I see that it's 40m long, that's incredible.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Two CH-53E Super Stallions should be able to handle such
| a container, then (max external payload capacity is about
| 16,000kg). Any American aircraft carriers nearby?
|
| And this assumes that the containers are indeed loaded to
| their full weight capacity.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| The lighter ones will be at the top anyway to keep center
| of gravity correct.
|
| Shipping company should know exact weights of each
| container for this and billing reasons.
| blackrock wrote:
| What's the math like if you use 4 Chinooks? One on each
| corner. Someone, break down the component forces.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Maybe placing 4 helicopters within 40ft of each other is
| not such a great idea?
| blackrock wrote:
| I should've been more clear. The helicopters could be 100
| feet apart. Each helicopter would hook on to the corner
| of each container, and pull away diagonally.
|
| The lift capability of this setup is from the y axis. But
| at a reduced load. This is a physics problem.
| unionpivo wrote:
| There are between 6 000 to 20 000 containers on this
| ship.
|
| Thou reduce weight any meaningful amount you would need
| to remove hundreds or even thousands of containers.
|
| I am not even sure if anyone would be willing to fly 4
| helicopters tethered to each other, but even if they do,
| its going to be very slow for safety reasons.
|
| And good like finding insurance company that is willing
| to cover, if anything goes wrong.
|
| And enough pilots and helicopters, to do that 24/7 for a
| few months
|
| > This is a physics problem no it isn't
| justbrowsing_ wrote:
| Last time I heard that was the Maemo OS codename before
| Diablo
| as-j wrote:
| This thing could have 20,000 containers on it. Thankfully
| it's a 3rd of a mile long, so maybe you could offload 2 at
| a time, one helicopter on either end. At 1 container every
| 5 minutes....working 24 hours per day....that's 70 days of
| work.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I doubt you'd have to unload the whole ship though.
| [deleted]
| themeiguoren wrote:
| I'm thinking a shipping container zipline.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Push enough off, then pull them onto the ground. Truck them
| to the local market and get whatever you can.
| rjvs wrote:
| They are locked in place in a frame system. They have to be
| lifted off.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Unframe them?
|
| When they're unloaded, I don't see a massive empty frame,
| so unframing is done at some level.
| lmilcin wrote:
| There are 20 thousand containers on that ship. No, that's not
| a mistake. It says it can carry 20 thousand and I assume it
| travels at capacity.
|
| Even if you could somehow launch one every minute that would
| still take 2 weeks of non-stop bombardment.
|
| Fascinating how much stuff you can put on a ship and the
| scale of loading/unloading operation.
| anderspitman wrote:
| Huh, a case where using kubernetes is actually justified.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| Well, using helm certainly would have been advisable.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Maybe they did! Modern helm doesn't have a tiller ...
| seems like this explains the mid-canal steering problem!
| nhoughto wrote:
| I was thinking, no way isn't there a 10k container limit?
|
| Nope 300k appr ! https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-
| practices/cluster-larg...
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Also like kubernetes, here's a picture of 20,000 zombie
| containers, getting no work done.
| stormcode wrote:
| Thank you, I needed that laugh.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| How do they load and unload these things in a port in only
| a couple of days?! Do the cranes take off several
| containers at a time? It's hard for me to imagine they can
| move a container off the ship and get back to another
| container in less than a minute.
| toast0 wrote:
| The cranes take one container off at a time (except when
| the container underneath sticks to the top one, which is
| not good). Actually, wikipedia says some cranes do two to
| four containers on purpose now.
|
| Usually the crane operator will load/unload several
| containers without moving along the dock; because they're
| all lined up, the crane only needs to travel in two
| dimensions (vertically and across the boat from port to
| starboard). The cranes are specialized to pick up
| containers by the top corners, which makes connecting
| fast. Standardized containers means the corners are at
| the same place (ok, there's a few sizes, but 40 ft
| containers are the vast majority of ocean shipping) and
| lining up is easy. On the dockside, there's a crew of
| longshoremen that move chassis (trailers) into place for
| the crane to drop (gently, usually) the containers on,
| those are then parked nearby, etc.
|
| Depending on the ship (and the dockside staffing), you
| can have multiple cranes working the ship. Planning is
| required to keep the ship balanced and minimize the
| number of containers moved. These ships generally visit
| several ports in order, and usually both unload and load
| at all of them, so it's complex.
|
| Depending on the traffic (and pandemics), the port runs
| up to three shifts.
| petronio wrote:
| You can have multiple cranes working on a ship in
| parallel, like in
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590t6mbebsc
| kqr wrote:
| And they are unloaded onto something that can transport
| them out of the way. Even in the desert, after 3,000 or
| so containers, finding room in the big pile to unload
| number 3,001 without moving the crane to make a new pile
| might be problematic.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yeah, and those systems are fully automated too - years
| if not decades before e.g. Amazon started doing something
| similar in their warehouses. Mind you, containers were
| standardized in the 60's so there's a bit of a head start
| there.
| gala8y wrote:
| This video really shows the process up close:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj7ixi2lqF4
| tyingq wrote:
| It has a max capacity of 20 thousand TEU, which is "20 foot
| equivalents". Most of the containers on the ship appear to
| be 40 foot ones. So 10,000 is probably closer to the total
| number.
|
| Edit: It may also not be "full". Here's a top/bottom
| picture with the most "full" I could find on the top, and
| the current situation on the bottom.
| https://imgur.com/a/b8neNkR
|
| Edit: So maybe 6000 40 foot containers, current state?
| neogodless wrote:
| In the photo where it looks quite full, the visible edge
| containers appear to be about 10x24x28 or 6,720 not
| accounting for missing ones on the top layers. In a photo
| from today it looked closer to _only_ 6,000. Of course
| this methodology may be flawed or have some bad
| assumptions. Like containers below the visible deck
| layer??!
| tyingq wrote:
| Pretty sure they would all be above and visible. Here's
| the ship empty: http://www.shipspotting.com/photos/middle
| /7/2/1/2892127.jpg
|
| And a good photo to confirm your 28 bow-to-stern number:
| https://photos.fleetmon.com/vessels/ever-
| given_9811000_26410...
| neogodless wrote:
| Nice! There do appear to be gaps reducing that 28 a bit,
| too... So I can't imagine there are 6,720 containers on
| the ship today.
| gk1 wrote:
| They hold containers inside, too. Or else the ship would
| get too top-heavy. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/dd/72/f
| 2/dd72f2e14fa997abad81...
| neogodless wrote:
| Oh wow. Not enough to double it but this could get it
| right to around 10,000 forty foot containers or 20,000
| TEU.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Which also suggests if they start pushing containers off
| to lighten the load, they'll be easy to push, but they'll
| need to push off more.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Thanks for the correction.
|
| Then a week of bombardment. Still impressive.
| fallingknife wrote:
| So no way you're doing it in less than a few months without
| a port facility. A year would be 1 every 25 mins which I
| think is more likely.
| Evil_Saint wrote:
| In an emergency situation like this: could they not use
| helicopters to lift containers off of the ship and just stack
| them next to the canal until they've freed the ship?
|
| Seems pretty quick to setup and do assuming there are
| helicopters that can move that weight.
| t90fan wrote:
| Containers are 2 (20ft) or 4 (40ft) tonnes (roughly)
| unloaded.
|
| And they can (if I remember right) contain 20 tonnes or so,
| of cargo.
|
| Our current chinooks can handle 10 tonnes, and the old models
| could carry 4, if I recall.
|
| And probably less in desert heat.
|
| So helicopters will not be moving any containers
| JshWright wrote:
| Unloading it may be exactly what happens (based on comments
| from the Dutch salvage company brought in to deal with the
| mess). And yeah, it's going to take weeks (best case scenario).
| jacquesm wrote:
| Exactly. I'm guessing weeks rather than days, and maybe more
| than that.
|
| The best I can come up with is heavy lift helicopters to at
| least remove the front most containers to relieve some of the
| pressure but even that would be an enormous operation.
|
| Anything else would require major construction especially if it
| is to reach more than just the first four or five rows which is
| likely not going to be enough.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-26
|
| Can do up to 60 tons total weight for a bit. That should cover
| even the heaviest containers. At least, I hope it does, if not
| they're royally screwed.
| tzs wrote:
| The helicopter itself is 30 tons, leaving you 30. But 60 is
| the max takeoff weight. The max weight it is actually
| designed to operate at when carrying the maximum load is
| about 55 tons. With 30 for the helicopter itself, that leaves
| 25 tons for the load.
|
| A container can be up to 33 tons loaded, so the heaviest will
| be beyond that helicopter (at least of you don't want to push
| it past its safe limits).
|
| I assume that the heaviest containers are on the bottom of
| the stack, and that most containers aren't near the limit, so
| it could probably unload a substantial number of them.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I said 'total weight'. That includes the helicopter,
| obviously, you're not going to magically get a zero mass
| helicopter.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| You can't take only the containers at the ends, however,
| because the uneven weight would cause the center of the ship
| to collapse.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Not so sure about that collapse, the keel of the ship is
| currently supporting _all_ of that weight and seems to be
| holding up just fine. It 's essentially a suspension bridge
| at this point, but I agree that it is probably better to
| unload evenly, however, that will add another very
| substantial time penalty. If the ship would break (which I
| have no idea at what load imbalance that would happen)
| there would be a delay a lot longer so it may be worth it
| to play this extra safe. But there is a very large amount
| of pressure on the people there to get this resolved.
| ivanhoe wrote:
| >Some people saying: just drag it off of the sand. Okay! And
| what happens when that causes you to rip a hole into the hull
| of the ship? Now it's really stuck.
|
| Not just that, but don't forget the inertia. The moment the
| ship gets unstuck the force needed to get it moving, multiplied
| with the ship's huge mass would create such a huge momentum
| that it would be very hard to stop it from hitting the other
| shore with the stern.
| tim333 wrote:
| The hull looks pretty tough but it's gonna be a job getting
| enough pull to drag the thing.
| EGreg wrote:
| Why not just CUT IT APART and clean up the mess after?
|
| Like this: https://jalopnik.com/a-chain-just-cut-through-a-
| capsized-car...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Because that would take months; they'd have to unload it,
| pump out the oil and fuel, get a disassembly crew and a ton
| of gear and all the infrastructure around it, etc.
| [deleted]
| EGreg wrote:
| Then why not just BLOW IT UP?
| slimbods wrote:
| Seems like the risk assessment wasn't good if hitting the bank
| results in this kind of outcome.
| billfruit wrote:
| I'm not familiar with shipping, but I would guess there are
| some type of crane ships which could be dispatched along with
| barges to slowly offload some of the container. Obviously it is
| going to take some time mustering all these specialized craft
| and specialists on location.
|
| What's with the many joucular/tounge-in-cheek posts on this
| thread..
| zeteo wrote:
| >Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think
| you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship.
| You're basically asking to build a port in the middle of the
| egyptian desert. That isn't going to happen.
|
| I think you just need a smaller crane ship to transfer the
| cargo e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliary_crane_ship
| PeterisP wrote:
| IMHO would take weeks to unload the cargo with something like
| that.
| zeteo wrote:
| Yeah but you may not need to unload it completely. At some
| point as the buoyancy improves the tugs become more likely
| to pull it off.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Assuming the crane ship can even get into position to offload
| it.
|
| The ship is stuck because the sides of the canal are quite
| shallow.
|
| You are quite likely to get two stuck ships instead of one.
| samuell wrote:
| There are helicopters that I think can be used for (un)loading
| containers:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_S-64_Skycrane
| oAlbe wrote:
| Seems to have a max take off weight of 19 tons by the look of
| it. The heli itself weights about 9 of those tons already,
| which leaves 10 tons of leeway. Those containers, from what
| I've read around here, can be well above 30 tons each. So
| that sounds like a no go. Also, they built only 31 of those
| helis in total according to wikipedia.
| samuell wrote:
| Aha, OK, I didn't realize the copter itself was included in
| the 19 tons.
|
| I also saw someone mentioning 40 feet containers weighing
| up to max 9000 lb (ca 4 tons), but not sure it is a
| relevant or applicable number.
| kmonsen wrote:
| And 20k containers. I guess they don't have to offload all
| of them, but still it is hard to imagine numbers this
| large.
| thewarrior wrote:
| Crazy idea : Can we roll it into the water by pulling it over
| high strength rollers of some sort ? It would be pretty cool to
| use the same technique that was use to build the pyramids.
| cricalix wrote:
| Sane answer: No.
|
| The ship is 400 metres / 0.25 of a mile long. With
| containers, it weighs anywhere up to 199 _thousand_ tons. One
| does not simply attach a few hundred cables, put some rollers
| under it, and pull with all the tractors you can find in
| Egypt.
|
| Also, it's already in the water. It's just turned sideways
| and buried the bulb (by the looks) into the canal wall.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Since the sides of the channel are much more shallow than
| the middle, it's not floating in the water as both ends of
| the ship are stuck on the bottom.
| imtringued wrote:
| Is it possible to weld a large steel wire onto the ship and
| use some sort of explosive to pull it out of the sand?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > It would be pretty cool to use the same technique that was
| use to build the pyramids.
|
| I'm not saying it was aliens, but... it was aliens.
| clashmoore wrote:
| I'm thinking a complex series of pulleys and chains set up
| and attached to the Great Pyramids of Giza and then like a
| tooth tied to a string and door - attach the chains to some
| of Elon's rockets and pull that ship loose.
| blhack wrote:
| Okay hear me out:
|
| Somebody call Elon. Get the TBMs, and set them to work
| building a tunnel under the ship.
|
| Now fill the tunnel with giant rubber bladders.
|
| Call the Saudis and have them start shipping over helium.
| Fill the bladders with helium.
|
| Okay, keep the saudis around and get them to bring over one
| of the high pressure water drilling rigs that they use for
| oil. Start digging out the sand above the bladders, and float
| them up to be UNDER the ship.
|
| Okay now call the Dutch. Get them to bring over some MASSIVE
| water pumps and some damming equipment. The two guys on
| excavators can help. Dam up the canal on both sides of the
| ship, and pump out all the water.
|
| The bladders become rollers. Roll that ship back into the
| middle of the canal.
|
| Okay now repump the canal, and float the ship away. Bam.
| Done!
| testaoijoiaj wrote:
| > Get them to bring over some MASSIVE water pumps and some
| damming equipment.
|
| If you had this, then I would damn each side and pump water
| INTO that space. Raise water level, ship frees. Boom
| a9h74j wrote:
| Chicago1992 is standing by ready to donate air mattresses.
| a9h74j wrote:
| At the level of [un]reality in many of the comments under OP,
| actually the Great Pyramids were built off-site and then
| dragged to their present locations.
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| Unloading is feasible, it would just take a couple of weeks.
| They just need a floating crane on each side and some barges to
| take the containers away.
| bigfudge wrote:
| Is there a reason they couldn't have a smaller crane on board
| and dump them over the side. Surely even losing the cargo
| would be cheaper than keeping it blocked at this point?
| gregoriol wrote:
| Nature loves you!
| input_sh wrote:
| I think you're severely overestimating the depth of the
| canal. I'm too lazy to look up the depth of the specific
| section where it's stuck, but some sections are just 20
| something meters deep.
|
| In other words, just deep enough for ships to come through
| with little wiggle room. Not as tight as the Panama Canal,
| but it's not much bigger.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| The canal is only 24m deep.... one or two containers would
| essentially block it for most traffic.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| If you dump the containers over the side, you managed to
| remove a ship blocking the canal, but now it's blocked by
| containers.
| bigfudge wrote:
| Right, but you don't need to leave them there. If it's
| limited depth you could pull them away with barges.
| dahfizz wrote:
| How long do you think it takes to fish a 20 ton container
| up from the bottom of a canal and load it onto a barge?
| There are ~10,000 containers.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Barge? Pull it over the edge and worry about it later.
|
| Depending on contents, some might float very well. Or
| even dissolve away. My dollar store salt-shakers (with
| salt) came from vietnam.
|
| The top will be the lightest containers, so I'm guessing
| that's where your 40 footer of ping pong balls is
| sitting.
| bigfudge wrote:
| Yes - that's kind of what I had in mind when I first
| suggested it. When containers fall of ships they often
| wash ashore on the UK coast. Even a container of
| motorbikes arrived in Cornwall recently... I'm presuming
| that only happens because they have some natural
| bouyancy.
| Pxtl wrote:
| If they don't tear when they hit the water (the metal is
| pretty thin) they should float shouldn't they? At 77
| cubic meters and 30 tonnes their density is low enough,
| and they're generally watertight aren't they?
| bigfudge wrote:
| Tie heavy duty straps with a small float attached to it
| before you dump it over the side, then use a tug to pull
| it away.
| Arrath wrote:
| Dumping things over the side, into the canal? That would
| rapidly block up the canal even worse.
| [deleted]
| mcdevilkiller wrote:
| Plus a couple of weeks to get the cranes there, I guess.
| blhack wrote:
| Maybe. That's a lot of barges. Remember that you then have to
| go and unload the barges, and there are 20,000 containers.
| imglorp wrote:
| 20,000 TEU, not containers.
| rmccue wrote:
| TEU being Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit, and containers
| generally are either 20ft or 40ft long.
| tyingq wrote:
| You can see from pictures that most of the containers are
| 40 foot ones. Also, the ship doesn't appear to be at full
| capacity to me. See https://imgur.com/a/b8neNkR (top is
| as full a picture as I could find, bottom is current). My
| guess is ~6000 40 foot containers in its current state.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| What's the difference, for purposes of estimating
| workload?
| Clewza313 wrote:
| Containers are 1 or 2 TEUs, although doubles are more
| common for long distance, so you're probably looking at
| 10,000-ish containers.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| > That's a lot of barges.
|
| Maybe bring _another_ Evergreen ship there and move
| containers onto it...?
| tempestn wrote:
| I read that there aren't any tall enough cranes in that area
| to do it, so they're considering unloading some containers by
| helicopter.
| barbegal wrote:
| Even if you could unload a container per minute you could
| only unload less than 1000 containers per day (assuming
| it's too dangerous to work at night) so at least 3 weeks of
| continuous helicopter operations.
| mlyle wrote:
| But a few days of operations, and unloading ballast/fuel,
| and dredging, and other efforts to refloat may be
| successful _together_.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| 3 weeks of continuous helicopter operations for what?
| Ship doesn't need to be empty.
| tempestn wrote:
| Yes, that's true. It still might be faster than other
| options. You wouldn't likely need to unload the whole
| thing though, just lighten it enough to get it unstuck.
| joering2 wrote:
| Doubt that's the case. The weight on it currently forced
| it deep enough into the sand. Just unloading half of it
| won't make it magically raise from the sands. The analogy
| here would be like saying pumping out Whale's stomach
| will make it possible to drag him back deep into the
| ocean.
| mlyle wrote:
| Even though the vessel sits on sand, it still displaces a
| lot of water, which reduces the force of it sitting on
| the sand by a lot. Removing cargo, fuel, and dredging
| reduces it yet more.
| joering2 wrote:
| Its most likely irrelevant. The reason why you see front
| so high up is because all the vessel's weight forced and
| smashed itself against the shallow water. At this point,
| rather than not the fuselage is damaged, and attempt to
| "ease up" the weight could only make it worse. I have
| been working enough around cargo vessels and at this size
| its never "oh he hit something, just put in reverse and
| you good to go". Similar if you ever get stabbed with a
| knife - hope never - but if you will, do not attempt to
| remove it on your own - you need to see a specialist who
| knows how to remove object it without causing internal
| bleeding, etc.
|
| This vessel is most likely trash at this point. Time is
| of essence because tidal is pushing it against shallows
| and since its not perfectly centered it will eventually
| tip and with these amount of weight, not much tipping
| required for the whole thing to snawball. At this time
| they are figuring out how to quickly remove (save) as
| many containers as possible. Most likely will happen with
| another of these monsters to "park" close by and one by
| one will move the most expensive cargo first.
|
| Another option I got from my buddy who is doing this
| stuff for life, is suggestion to dig up a whole big
| enough underneath to actually sunk the whole thing. This
| can be done in less than one week and is fastest most
| "stable" option. At this point they are not looking at
| saving this one vessel, but rather how to get the canal
| to operate again asap. You probably know it from driving
| on highway "move aside accident vehicles" is the most
| important thing to do.
| mlyle wrote:
| We'll see. Right now it seems the plan is to dredge, and
| supplement that with partial unloading of the vessel.
| rcpt wrote:
| Hm. I live in Long Beach and those guys are definitely
| used to working at night
| andrewflnr wrote:
| In helicopters? That's the tricky part.
| gspr wrote:
| ... in helicopters, _in the desert without the
| infrastructure of a major harbor_ , no less!
| moonbug wrote:
| that "just" is doing even more work than the guy in the
| digger.
| one2three4 wrote:
| The economic fallout will be big and it gets worse day by day.
| And we weren't exactly in the best shape to begin with...
|
| Suez canal seems to be a Single Point of Failure.
| cm2187 wrote:
| But naively, I'd think you just need to apply the opposite
| force to the force that got it stuck. Surely that didn't break
| the hull.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I think they've already tried that with tugboats, but it's
| really really stuck / wedged in.
| mc32 wrote:
| Not saying it can work in this scenario, but I think salvagers
| have used pneumatic devices to float and or manoeuver derelict
| ships.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Depending on the design and bulk heads ripping a hole in the
| hull can be an option. My father was a naval architect and did
| some work re-floating container ships and I know they did this
| on at least one occasion and got the ship up the west coast of
| Africa, past Spain and Portugal, and through the English
| Channel. They would have stopped earlier but the ship yards en
| route jacked up their prices because they assumed there was no
| other choice.
|
| The interesting thing for me is going to be where that ship
| goes if they manage to re-float it.
| xg15 wrote:
| Dumb question: How about evacuating and then blowing up the
| ship?
|
| Yes, the loss of the ship and all its cargo will be immense,
| but that seems to be dwarfed by the damage the blocked canal
| causes.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Then how do you clean up 220,000 tons of debris?
|
| Turns out: the container ship __itself__ is the easiest way
| to move all of that debris out. And its already packed and
| loaded.
| VRay wrote:
| you just have to blow it up REALLY HARD
|
| Like that old Mythbusters episode where they blow up a car
| twice
|
| I think the Earth could use just ONE MORE nuclear crater..
| nwallin wrote:
| I think you've overestimating how much stuff an explosion
| removes, as opposed to breaks. Explosions are very good
| at making a functional thing not function anymore, but
| they're not as good as you think they are at evacuating
| an area.
|
| Look at the aftermath of the Beirut explosion. The metal
| frame of the building the explosion happened in is still
| lying there.
|
| The blast radius of an explosion scales with the cube
| root of the energy of the explosion. So if you want to
| make the hole twice as big, you need eight times as much
| explosives. To create a hole the size of a large
| container ship, you'll need a nuke. A pretty big one too.
| The Ever Given is 400m long, the crater left by the
| Trinity test (22kt) was 390m across.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| Why not use a nuke?
|
| Modern weapons can be very clean. :]
| fogihujy wrote:
| Because you still need to use the canal afterwards. And
| you need to convince the crews of the ships that the
| radiation won't be a problem. And the authorities of the
| ports they go to. And so on.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| If Elon Musk solves this with some combination of space
| gadgetry and boring machines, we're going to have to
| declare him Earth Emperor.
| xg15 wrote:
| I mean, the 220,000 tons of debris are at least not a
| single solid object - so maybe they'd be moved by the
| current (if there is any) or could be pushed to the sides
| by smaller vessels. Then the actual cleanup can happen
| while the canal is already back in operation.
|
| > _the container ship __itself__ is the easiest way to move
| all of that debris out._
|
| Well, evidently not if it is stuck.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| You'd need a nuclear-level explosion to blow this ship up
| into small, practically movable pieces that aren't
| connected anymore. Everything on that ship is steel.
| Conventional explosions would just blow a few holes in
| it, and deform everything enough that moving things
| becomes impossible.
| nomy99 wrote:
| Bunch of these
| ?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_of_All_Bombs
| nwallin wrote:
| Won't work. Thermobaric weapons are very good at killing
| people, and breaking equipment, but aren't particularly
| good at evacuating material.
| nomy99 wrote:
| I was going by the amount of tnt/bomb payload. It's about
| 44 tonnes of tnt.
| nwallin wrote:
| Yup, I get it. The energy released by a thermobaric
| weapon is spread out over a very, very large distance.
| Inside the blast, people will be killed and equipment
| will be rendered interoperable by the extreme temperature
| and the over pressure. Outside the blast you have a very
| strong (but subsonic) blast wave. But inside the blast,
| the pressure will envelope stuff, and push on it from
| both sides. With regards to blasting away a very large
| ship, thermobaric weapons are not particularly effective.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _You 'd need a nuclear-level explosion_
|
| Yup.
|
| ...I mean, come on. After the last five years, it
| wouldn't even be the craziest thing to happen.
|
| I admit, fallout could be a problem though, especially
| with all the other ships in close proximity.
| dragontamer wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads
|
| A nuclear explosion probably would damage the canal
| itself. But its said that USS LSM-60's pieces were never
| found again...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_LSM-60
|
| Just 170 yards away was USS Arkansas, a battleship. The
| hull mostly survived (though was deformed and melted).
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Build a huge cover all around the ship, plant the nuke
| under the keel, boom we have a splash and the ship
| evaporates , canal is deeper and wider there
| [deleted]
| tesseract wrote:
| A pile of steel that used to be a ship, won't float
| anymore. It would have to get dredged out of the canal
| piece by piece.
| Aperocky wrote:
| The wreck would continue to sit in the canal...
| akmarinov wrote:
| Can't we just dig a new canal?
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Theoretically, yes. Practically, removing this ship is faster
| and cheaper.
| saalweachter wrote:
| The most impressive thing to me, reading this comment thread,
| is all the ways the situation could get _worse_.
| trhway wrote:
| >You're basically asking to build a port in the middle of the
| egyptian desert.
|
| No. Helicopters. 10 helis, 1 container/sortie, 10 sorties/hour
| = 10000 containers in 5 days.
| PeterisP wrote:
| You can't possibly have 10 helis safely unloading cargo at
| once from a single ship, that'd be an invitation for
| disaster. Also, doing that in the dark would simply not work.
| 10 sorties/hour is also unrealistic; with proper cranes and
| infrastructure at port it would take something like 10
| minutes, with choppers it would take more time.
|
| IMHO if helis would even work (which is debatable and debated
| here), the optimistic estimate is that you could unload
| something like 20 containers per hour, 300 containers per
| day, so 30 days for the cargo. It seems plausible that you
| can dredge the banks and drag the ship out much quicker than
| that.
| trhway wrote:
| >You can't possibly have 10 helis safely unloading cargo at
| once from a single ship
|
| 5 loading at a time, while the other 5 unloading on the
| ground - plenty of space as ship is 1300 feet long.
|
| > doing that in the dark would simply not work
|
| you flood the ship and the space around with light. Almost
| 30 years ago we did a night ship unload at an unprepared
| location - no issues.
|
| >10 sorties/hour is also unrealistic
|
| doing it with crane we did about 15+ - we weren't union
| operation though - we were paid for performance, not time
| :) and being young we were moving fast. With chopper not
| much different if weather is ok.
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Just set up a ski lift-like structure on both sides of a
| canal, and run it with containers instead of skiers
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 10 helis, 20tons each, 10 sorties/hour = 200k ton in 5
| days.
|
| Among the many problems with this calculation is that
| shipping containers can't be freely subdivided and
| recombined, and can have a loaded weight over 30 tons.
|
| EDIT: And to address the crossing edit:
|
| > 10 helis, 1 container/sortie, 10 sorties/hour = 10000
| containers in 5 days.
|
| ...and the heaviest-lift helicopters can't lift 30 tons.
| trhway wrote:
| One would expect lightest containers on top, heaviest at
| the bottom. CH53 can lift 15ton, so probably it can unload
| several top layers.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| The pictures I've seen completely hide the ship's bulbous bow.
| It juts out seemingly like 50 feet from the front of the bow
| that you can see. It looks like all of that is wedged in the
| sand
| RantyDave wrote:
| Bingo. It's long, fat, and like the pharaohs ... buried in
| Egypt.
| nullserver wrote:
| Snip snip.
|
| Just cut the tip off.
| yebyen wrote:
| Well the front's not supposed to fall off. The front fell
| off in this case, but it's very unusual.
| mindcrime wrote:
| What's the minimum crew requirement?
| niceairport wrote:
| One, I suppose.
| whatusername wrote:
| context for those who haven't seen it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
| cycomanic wrote:
| That's hilarious, thanks for posting
| IgorPartola wrote:
| And have it sink there permanently?
| nullserver wrote:
| It's half a joke. Think men in tights.
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k4v8BVKlAfM
|
| But also curious of the bulb can be removed without
| affecting the integrity.
| meowster wrote:
| Yes, the bulb can be removed and the ship still
| seaworthy.
| meowster wrote:
| Ships have watertight bulkheads behind the bow in case
| they run into something. The ship can definitely sail
| without the bow. They should just cut it off and leave it
| there as a reminder to others not to f* up.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| How about creating a mini-dam surrounding the vessel and
| raising the water level so it can turn.
|
| Or stopping the current at 90% of the ship and letting it push
| to the front ( if it's in the right direction), perhaps in
| combination with gigantic sails ( if there's enough wind)
| and/or sucking sand/mud from the bottom.
| nine_k wrote:
| Apparently, there are no watertight gates anywhere near.
|
| Filling in the entire canal is unrealistic.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| I'm not saying the entire canal. Surround the boat, make a
| dam somehow.
|
| Concrete is dry in 24-48 hours. Sand and wooden poles could
| be enough.
|
| Some ideas on the how, could be found in this video, on how
| they created a bridge in the middle ages:
| https://youtu.be/nJgD6gyi0Wk
|
| I'm pretty sure engineers could find better/faster
| solutions than what I'm proposing.
| cricalix wrote:
| The canal is 200 metres wide, 25ish metres deep. Gotta
| think in the cube, because now you're talking volume. I
| have zero idea what thickness you're going to need for
| your dam, but I'm going to spitball and say 10 metres at
| the top, and 30 metres at the bottom to get a slope like
| you'd see on something like the Hoover Dam.
|
| This means you need to provide .. lets see, a trapezoidal
| cross section is 500 square metres.. 100,000 cubic metres
| of filler. Twice. And then you probably need to curve it
| to resist the pressure, so that's a bit of a lowball
| figure. You can't dam any less, because the ship is stuck
| sideways across the canal.
|
| Using some old numbers for concrete pours in Ireland
| (2016 era) per cubic metre, that's 7.5 million Euro worth
| of concrete. Sure, you're not going to use pure concrete
| like that though - you'd probably start dropping massive
| boulders in first, and then try to cap/fill it.
|
| Have a read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Islands
| to get a feel for how long it takes to lay in that much
| material..
|
| And then you have to dig it all back up to reopen the
| canal.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| So clearly we just need.to find some sand beavers.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| 160 km of protection against 2m. High waves to build
| something on unstable soil isn't exactly the same thing
| as this, is it.
|
| They need some construction which they can add water
| faster than it escapes the container, to raise the water
| level.
|
| If stacked water based cofferdams would be a solution (
| idk depending on these requirements, current, ..), it
| could be done quickly if they have the bags ( multiple
| teams, multiple locations to start and filling the
| coffers with water as soon as possible). The budget to
| fix this fast is probably pretty high. A lot would depend
| on how much they need to raise the water for the
| pressure, so it wouldn't collapse. ( Fyi, i do think
| water based coffers would collapse, but perhaps sand ones
| can be placed in top on it for 1 meter).
|
| Palm islands needed a construction that holds multiple
| years and isn't the same as the issue in the Suez canal.
|
| Tu be honest, I'm just thinkering about the variables
| that could make this work, instead of dismissing it
| immediately.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > Using some old numbers for concrete pours in Ireland
| (2016 era) per cubic metre, that's 7.5 million Euro worth
| of concrete.
|
| A sister comment mentioned 400$ million per hour worth of
| trades being blocked by this, so the _cost_ of this would
| probably recouped by the time the order is cleared.
| gruez wrote:
| >A sister comment mentioned 400$ million per hour worth
| of trades being blocked by this
|
| but it's not $400M lost? If you ordered a $100 package
| from amazon and it got stuck in transit it's not a $100
| loss.
| devdas wrote:
| Quite a lot of shipped goods have tight delivery
| schedules requirements.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| There are fees associated with lateness.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Not all. But there are late fees, refunds, profits lost
| because your ship now has to travel a larger route and
| can therefore take fewer roubdtrips, increasing costs per
| roundtrip due to the longer route etc.. If we just assume
| a meager 1% actual loss, the concrete would be worth it
| in two hours. Even with the remaining expenses due to
| work, this should pay for itself rather quickly.
| nullserver wrote:
| Lot of heavy containers that aren't being used at the
| moment.
| _Microft wrote:
| What if we could _part_ the water at both sides of the
| ship? Would that suffice as makeshift gates?
|
| The Egyptians had a bad experience with that in the past
| though and lost a lot of gear and many men in an incident.
| Might be understandable if they didn't want to do that
| again.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Cofferdams could be viable
|
| Relevant feedback on pro's/cons:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26587692
| nomy99 wrote:
| Let me call moses, hold on.
| throwaway41597 wrote:
| How would you remove such a dam? Sounds like it'd take weeks
| to build and weeks to remove?
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Cofferdam are temporarily dams.
|
| Biggest issues seem to be building ( and logistics) +
| deconstructing. But i saw an estimate of a cofferdam for a
| bridge of 640 meters ( but less deep and with a single
| crane) of 16 days.
| krick wrote:
| Ok, since everyone is sharing their solutions, and nobody named
| the most obvious one, I'll do it: just nuke it from orbit.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm at a seaside resort in Egypt so I could get a bucket and
| spade and head up there to dig it out. Might take a while
| though.
| mooreds wrote:
| Don't worry, there's a guy digging it out :)
|
| https://twitter.com/SuezDiggerGuy
| [deleted]
| masklinn wrote:
| > Look at some of the photos of the front of it. Look at how
| far out of the water it is sitting. The ship might look like
| that if it were totally empty, but not when it is full of
| containers like this.
|
| One thing many people are missing is the Suez Canal is not
| concrete, it's sand, so the canal "walls" are not vertical
| they're a relatively gentle 3:1 slope (4:1 in wider areas).
| Meaning only the center half of the canal is flat and "at
| depth", the ship started hitting sand 30-40m from the edge of
| the canal. By the time it reached the visible edge it's half-
| sitting on sand half wedged into it.
| koheripbal wrote:
| There are locks on either end of the canal. I wonder if the
| water level can be raised a little to help?
| akg_67 wrote:
| There is high tide in canal till next Thursday. It is the
| best window moving the ship. Once low tide, it will be much
| more difficult to unstuck the ship and move.
|
| https://www.tide-forecast.com/locations/Suez-
| Egypt/tides/lat...
| elorant wrote:
| You could unload it using crane ships, and just leave the
| containers in heaps on the bank of the river, but it could take
| weeks because that thing is filled to the brink. Any way you
| look at it there's not an easy solution in sight.
| antidamage wrote:
| Helicopters are a thing.
|
| And yeah, even completely empty with no fuel or ballast you
| will never see the bow out of the water like that. However it
| is more than capable of surviving being dragged along sand.
| It's just that they have nothing strong enough to drag it with.
|
| Eventually someone will stake some anchors into the ground and
| use an industrial winch, but that's where hull design starts to
| suck - there's no good anchor points by which to pull it, so
| there'll need to be a large number of straps cradling the hull
| that are being pulled.
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| This was my though, winchers/dozers etc pulling back the
| angle it went in on a high tide. Of all the solutions
| suggested this seems the simplest and easiest materials.
|
| For anchor points they could easily weld additional steel
| plates/rings at numerous points on the hull for a many lines
| spread out.
|
| Maybe place some cables under the front section attached to
| airbags. It would not lift it off the sand but may help with
| downward pressure on the pull back + the excavator work.
|
| Also cant you vibrate/aerate sand to make it have a liquid
| effect? Might help pressure but no idea how that could be
| done at scale required... winches and cable seems easy to
| access fast.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Just an order of magnitude viz-a-viz a winch:
|
| -- the Ever Given has a mass of ~220,000 tons (2.2e8 kg)
|
| -- let us _very_ conservatively assume that it is a
| homogeneous block, 1 /3rd of which is on sand, 2/3rds of
| which is on water
|
| -- the Coulomb coefficient of friction for steel on sand is
| a very complex function of sand composition and size, but
| roughly it's about u=0.5 and F=uR [1]
|
| -- For the 2/3rds of the ship that are in the water assume
| that it moves frictionlessly in an inviscid liquid (not
| true at all else ships wouldn't have huge engines!)
|
| -- You therefore need to apply a net tension of >=0.3 x 0.5
| x 2.2e8 [?] 33 MN to a wire to have a remote chance in hell
| of accelerating the ship backwards
|
| -- This is about twice the thrust of a Space Shuttle solid
| rocket booster at liftoff.
|
| [1] https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sandf1972/26/4/26_
| 4_139...
| King-Aaron wrote:
| How long do you think it would take to unload 20,000 40-foot
| containers via helicopter?
|
| I'll start with my guess: A long time
| RapidFire wrote:
| You would probably need to be the US military. Once you
| have a setup onsite; helicopters, pilots, fuel,
| maintenance, crew to rig containers, you could rapidly
| unload the containers. Check out this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08K_aEajzNA
|
| US Military is probably the only entity that could pull
| this off in a timely manner. At great cost of course...
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Except the US Military has exactly zero helicopters
| capable of lifting anything that heavy.
|
| Russian Military has:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-26
|
| That's the one they've used to rescue downed US
| helicopters :)
| RapidFire wrote:
| Looks like your right. The US has: https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/wiki/Sikorsky_CH-53E_Super_Stallion... as its near
| equivalent with a external payload of 36,000 lb. The
| Russian helicopter carries 8000lbs more at 44,000lb,
| though Wikipedia doesn't say if this is an external or
| internal payload.
|
| Looks like a 40ft shipping container weights around
| 8000lbs empty, couldn't find a stat on full. It seems
| such an operation would be outside the capacity of these
| helicopters. Sure they could comfortably lift empty
| containers, but probably not full ones.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think
| you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship."_
|
| I would guess someone could figure out how to use a normal-ish
| crane to unload _some_ of the containers and set them down in
| the sand. The top containers look like they are maybe 150 feet
| or so higher than ground level.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Even if so, now you've got a handful of containers on the
| sand _and_ a giant ship stuck in the canal.
| tyingq wrote:
| Sure. Just guessing that taking weight off of the end
| that's marooned in the sand might help.
|
| Edit. Okay "ends".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Just guessing that taking weight off of the end that's
| marooned in the sand might help.
|
| It is crosswise and in the banks on both sides.
| [deleted]
| kevinsundar wrote:
| I wonder, could you liquify the soil around the buried part of
| the ship by pumping air into the surrounding areas?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_liquefaction
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Now _that_ is an interesting idea.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Just use some thumpers and Shai-Hulud will save the day.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Classic old man and sandworm pulling the ship free.
| porjo wrote:
| It was only a matter of time
| https://twitter.com/addiiceland/status/1374634903321649154
| Karupan wrote:
| OT: is it a given that the person responsible (the captain?) will
| be fired once this is over? Can the org running the Suez Canal
| deny entry to vessels by black listing the captain?
| phenylene wrote:
| My non-techie wife just said to me, "We need to NFT this
| situation somehow."
|
| She's been down that rabbit hole ever since reading about the
| Beeple piece.
| mark_mart wrote:
| I hope she reads the article about Beeple fraud. Buyer and
| owner of that art are basically investors in the same nft comp,
| there is no transaction either. It's just a PR.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| She needs to read this to come up with an equally genius
| marketing plan for her NFT.
|
| An NFT is about marketing. The products value is how well the
| product is marketed and nothing else. It's purified
| capitalism!
| SilverRed wrote:
| I feel like everyone was going through massive amounts mental
| gymnastics to justify how NFTs are not just a scam like they
| look on the surface but how they are actually legitimate.
| News companies chipped in with the "well um actually value is
| just made up anyway"
|
| But no, in the end it was just another crypto scam.
| meowster wrote:
| Maybe some kind of trustless crypto lotto about when the ahip
| will be freed?
| aritmo wrote:
| MarineTraffic direct URL:
| https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:5630138/zoo...
| kevinsundar wrote:
| I wonder, could you liquify the soil around the buried part of
| the ship by pumping air into the surrounding areas?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_liquefaction
| spindle wrote:
| Just like Austin Powers:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/embed/IGiQOCX9UbM
| fuzxi wrote:
| No embeds here
| spindle wrote:
| Thank you. Luckily, the embed code I pasted shows the URL
| nice and clearly :-)
| opsunit wrote:
| On the same topic, this is an excellent read:
| https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-seacowboys/
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| In hindsight, was it a good idea to allow ships that big through
| the canal?
|
| In the future, could they perhaps widen the canal and disallow
| ships large enough to block it?
| switch007 wrote:
| Why do I have the suspicion that an engineer raised a concern
| at some point but was shot down by someone with quotas to meet.
| johnnymontrose wrote:
| Pulleys man. Millions and millions of pulleys. Such a magnificent
| system of pulleys that a 3 year old could pull it.
| sn_master wrote:
| Or hydraulic arms? such that a squirrel could pull it then.
| lawwantsin17 wrote:
| SINK THE FUCKING SHIP
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(page generated 2021-03-26 23:03 UTC)