Suez canal blocked by a massive ship
twitter.com
twitter.com
https://www.google.com/search?q=evergreen+ever+given&source=...
In this picture of the ship stuck in the Suez, the red/black line appears to tilt noticeably upwards towards the bow:
https://twitter.com/marceldirsus/status/1374480496789393412
If this isn't some sort of optical illusion, the bow of the ship appears runaground by quite a bit.
My guess would be that they've emptied the ballast tanks in the end that has run aground and filled them in the other end to rise the keel.
https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1374597391463120896
It has gone in with some force.
Surprisingly, the bigger the boat the more effective. We tend to have a bias against larger machines, but often they can be the cleanest in proportion.
[1] https://www.ademe.fr/sites/default/files/assets/documents/86...
Assuming that pollution primarily caused by fuel usage of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78#IMO_2020
https://www.imo.org/fr/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-2...
https://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/pages/02-I...
The upper limit of the sulphur content of ships' fuel oil was reduced to 0.5% (from 3.5% previously) - under the so-called "IMO 2020" regulation prescribed in the MARPOL Convention. This significantly reduces the amount of sulphur oxide emanating from ships.https://cs.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_(raketa)
And it makes sense if you think about it - as you scale up, the ammount of fuel you can carry goes up roghly by cube while structure mass, forming a shell effectively arround the fuel, goes up by square of size of the rocket.
Similar things for air resistance - as you scale up yuour rocket the front part creating the most drag will scale more slowly than the volume of the rocket that goes to fuel, payload and structure.
No wonder Starship is already at 9 meters of width and 18 m has been mentioned as a possible future upgrade. Its already bigger than the massive 66+ meter high medieval watchtower in my home town yet it can fly to sub orbital speeds without its first stage booster (which is even bigger)!
"Maritime transport emits around 940 million tonnes of CO2 annually and is responsible for about 2.5% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (3rd IMO GHG study)."
https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/transport/shipping_en
The problem is that we (as a species) are moving far too much, far too far.
As for the comparison to trains, it matters a lot whether you're talking about diesel or electric trains. Most train lines in Europe are electrified, and as electricity production switches to solar/wind, it may actually end up being cleaner than ships. (Although work is also being done on making ships cleaner. But new international laws are probably needed to get everybody on board.)
The real issue, though, isn't no much whether the transport happens by boat or train, but that it happens at all. The scale of global shipping is this big because everything is produced on the other side of the world. Big ships make that transport more efficient, but a more egalitarian global economy that didn't create incentives for companies to seek out every low-wage country and tax haven, would make local manufacturing more attractive and reduce global shipping.
Even worse for planes on flight radar 24.
6000Nm and, say, 25 knots (probably a bit on the high side, but not by much) should add 240 hours of steaming or 10 days to the voyage.
(This will be somewhat offset by the lower speed through the channel, waiting times &c - I've no idea how long a typical Suez transit is.)
For yachts it is (supposed to be) two days. It's one day to Ismailia on either way and then one for the rest. (The paperwork however, may take longer, but can be arranged in advance.) See more at https://www.noonsite.com/report/suez-canal-transit-informati...
That's a lot of fetch for wind, which transfers energy to the ocean's surface, which travels as waves, which build up because there's no land damping from west to east. Throw in the Antarctic Circumpolar current and weather systems interacting with the Benguela current an Agulhas current... That's a lot of energy getting put into a relatively tiny band of water.
The Cape of Good Hope was previously known as the Cape of Storms based on the aforementioned confluence of forces generally making sea states miserable. The Good Hope part was what putatively happened after you got through it, and the seas you'd have to worry about would generally be calmer.
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:5630138/zoo...
I see that labeling too, but the Tahia Misr2 is a tug, sister to the Tahia Misr1.
I'm not sure why it's displaying as a pleasure craft.
Edit: The phrase "pleasure craft" is a triple entendre, and possibly a quadruple.
Does anyone know the transit time to pass through the canal versus going around the South Africa route?
EDIT: Just saw they had outages, but I guess nobody ever expected it to be trending on twitter. Works fine for me.
Maybe a similar combination of events happened here?
[0] https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/frachter-rammt-faehre-knapp-an-d...
If true, then the "systemic issue" is only that ships are getting too big.
Ships of ANY size are hard or impossible to maneuver when they are going slow and have a blackout. The size doesn't matter.
The control surfaces only work when they move with regards to water.
The ship that does not move is uncontrollable with rudder and it needs to use something else to help it maneuver. This something else can be a tugboat that rotates the ship by the force it can generate, or it can be thrusters. Thrusters aren't propulsion method and they are relatively small and can counter only so much wind.
I think the biggest issue is complexity and resulting unreliability. On a ship that has to be in constant use for decades you want things that are simple and reliable.
"The latest design, the Azipod X, incorporates these improvements, with a view to a service interval of five years, and features bearings that can be taken apart and repaired from inside the pod while the ship is harbored normally"
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. They are working on it:)
Also an important factor on large vessel is fuel efficiency. You don't want anything sticking out unless absolutely necessary, so these would have to be meant for propulsion. But because of complex construction I can expect they are less efficient than just straight through axle and a huge propeller on it.
I expect things like this to be useful on utility vessels of small to medium size where you don't necessarily need so much efficiency but the utility comes from being able to maneuver quickly and in various conditions.
They're quite efficient (although maybe only for lower speeds) and provide extreme maneuverability.
When the fuel efficiency and reliability drive your competitiveness that is a huge issue.
They use large two stroke diesel engines which can be stopped and started in reverse. They use an extra valve in the engine head to admit air for starting and have valve gear which controls the direction.
Cruise ships on the other hand have electrical house loads which are almost the same as their propulsion loads. In addition to the manoeuvrability advantages this makes diesel electric drive advantageous.
And yet, they were unable to prevent the wind from pushing them into a moored ferry they were passing.
The engine can most likely work both directions equally.
The propeller is optimized to work in forward direction, so it will have worse efficiency going in the other direction.
The rotation would have to be limited when going in reverse because of cavitation (and maybe other structural limitations). That again is a result of the wrong shape of the propeller (when in wrong direction).
The hull will have significantly more drag when in wrong direction.
Now, engine power is defined as whatever it can put out and if the engine works the same way in both directions then power is the same also.
So you can think this way: most likely it has the same power as going forward but it can't use it and whatever it can use will be much less efficiently translated into motion.
The more descriptive cause is the failure to pay for adequate tug support/escort.
"(Escort tug charge) = 6,600 SDR/tug"
The article cites a tug captain as saying that they have a very limited ability to react to big ships being pushed by strong wind. They compare it to driving a care on ice.
[1] https://gcaptain.com/grounded-mega-ship-blocking-suez-canal-...
> Early reports speculated the vessel suffered a loss of power, but the ship’s operator, Evergreen Marine Corp, told Agence France-Presse it ran aground after being hit by a gust of wind.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/24/huge-container...
The ship comes around the curve travelling north close to the outside (right, east, starboard) shore then overcorrect to the west shore then overcorrect more gravely to the east again and run aground.
Given that the accident happened in Germany and the ship is Taiwanese.
It is just freaky, I don't know if it is good or bad to be associated with such an incident.
In a plane crash they are usually quick to paint over the name of the airline company to not be associated. I don't think this is the same though.
I think it's not good because of the potential to become politicly charged. Add some "cyber" and it has NatSec types reeling. There is a scenario in Ghost Fleet[1] where a vessel sailing under a Chinese flag blocks the Panama canal in a theater of war with the West. Not going to issue any spoilers but it's a brilliant (fiction) novel for hypothetical future war scenario's.
Destroying or blocking as few as three locks could semi-permanently block all traffic in Panama, or worse, drain Gatun.
I can’t get worked up against them for wanting to get paid, even though I regard adverts as parasites of time, energy, and bandwidth and won’t disable my ad blocker for them — I don’t have solutions, just the aphorism about two wrongs.
I didn't tolerate it either — I can often figure out which button is "Necessary cookies only", but not in this case.
However, Firefox's reader mode retains the main image: https://www.mopo.de/image/32016852/2x1/940/470/afcc092634a9d...
But I agree with you that the placement and the fact that the banner blocks the whole website is unconvenient.
The second notification tells you to turn your ad-blocker of or to watch a video instead.
No, it is not mandatory by European law. The myth persists.
The site can use essential cookies or no cookies just fine, with no banner required at all. Nothing.
If they decide to use non-essential cookies, for example privacy-intrusion tracking cookies to follow your activity around the web for advertising, then they need to notify you of this tracking and obtain consent. You have a right to know, after all, and you might prefer to exercise your rights by declining consent. But nothing requires it to be a large banner, and nothing requires the "reject all" button to be difficult to find.
As I wrote, I find the blocking of the website and the placement of the banner unconvinient. I am also convinced that it should be mandatory to have a "essential cookies only" button.
I just wanted to explain what the banner is for, as the parent comment did not understand the german text.
https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1374468169784459267/pho...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ship...
Off-topic, but does anyone else find it odd to find fillers like "umm" and "uhh" to be typed out on sites like HN or reddit?
It influences other rockets as well - for example the Proton:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket_family)
The long thin tanks you see mounted on the first stage are not drop tanks or additional boosters, its the tanks holding the first stage fuel, with the central core holding all the oxidzer.
Thats because the core stage is limitted in width by what you can ship to Bayokonur by rail, especialy IIRC one specific rail tunnel on the route. So they ship the core stage and the additional fuel tanks on separate rail cars and then bolt them in place on the cosmodrome.
In similar manner Falcon 9 is limitted to 3.9 m of width as that is the maximum you can ship over the US highway network without special care.
If you want to go bigger, you need special aircraft and barges, or build the thing in place like it is currently being done with the SpaceX Starhip.
They are gonna run out of larger adjectives pretty soon.
“Super Container Ship II' Hyper Turbo Extra Special Champion Edition HD Remix”.
Btw, there's a similar conundrum with large telescope projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26333391
Large container ship 20 Ultra Plus 5G Fan edition
Apple's 12 Pro Max, though...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit#ULSI,_WSI,_...
I'm all for Hella Container Ship
Ship sizes can just reuse that replacing “graphics array” with “container ship” e.g. Quad Size Extended Container Ship.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telesco...
I remember driving up to one of the battleship memorials as a child and it just seemed like this big gray mountain at the end of the street.
Covers lots of questionable business practices, from employment conditions/health and safety, to tax etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience
Edited to add this (which I did not know, but think it interesting) from the Wikipedia article:
The modern practice of ships being registered in a foreign country [ie, a flag of convenience] began in the 1920s in the United States when shipowners seeking to serve alcohol to passengers during Prohibition registered their ships in Panama. Owners soon began to perceive advantages in terms of avoiding increased regulations and rising labor costs and continued to register their ships in Panama even after Prohibition ended.
I'm no expert in detecting shoops. But ELA looks fine to me, I don't think it's photoshopped.
Yikes.
I heard about this originally from a great German podcast "Geschichten aus der Geschichte": https://www.geschichte.fm/podcast/zs180/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal
I wonder what makes something significant enough to be added to this section. A quick scan of the page shows some interesting tidbits that aren't present in the opening (to me, more noteworthy - so far - than the ongoing blockage):
> The canal had an immediate and dramatic effect on world trade. Combined with the American transcontinental railroad completed six months earlier, it allowed the world to be circled in record time.
> In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, the canal was the scene of a major crossing by the Egyptian army into Israeli-occupied Sinai and a counter-crossing by the Israeli army to Egypt. Much wreckage from this conflict remains visible along the canal's edges.
Right now it's more a matter of racing to be as up-to-date as possible, rather than actually weighing the merits of having this in the opening section.
If its not immediately resolvable with the ships own facilities, then its not clear it can be solved in less than a-long-time. Maybe years?
Its 200 million pounds. It holds 20,000 units. To unload it would take building a facility on-site. And maybe a rail line to carry the cargo away.
I have hopes the tug solution will solve it. But if not, then there's probably no easy solution at all. Not one that costs less than a billion dollars?
In fact it’s already been 20 hours since the tweet was posted. I think the Twitter UI makes that clear enough, although reading the full thread is probably easier on Nitter https://nitter.cc/jsrailton/status/1374438210315513864
The Baraka1, which is already on the scene, is described here as the most powerful tug in the Middle East. It would probably take a while to bring in more powerful tugs.
"The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and _breaking global supply chains_" - Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development, 2010.
Sounds like they are digging too.
Interesting! That prompted me to look up Around the World in 80 Days, and it turns it out was published 3 years later (1872), using those pieces as part of the journey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Eighty_Day...
src: I work at a container-logistics software company, and we've handled and seen similar situations (sudden loss of a main class of transport for a few days).
Truck and train will probably see an increase as well on the China-Europe route if it takes too long.
All this is in contrast to the rest of the time you are onboard. You are right that not very much happens. The ocean is very, very big. The vast majority of the time you can't see any land, or any other ships. If you don't have a satellite receiver of your own, there is no internet, no news, no nothing. Sometimes there is a storm. Sometimes there is a sunset. Most of the time there's nothing of note. I found it really relaxing, but it's definitely not for everyone. It's also a very expensive way to travel compared to commercial airlines or even long distance rail.
Is that something you can pay to do?
I booked through a specialized travel agent in the EU that has since gone bust, but if you search the web for freighter cruise or cargo ship cruise you should be able to find some other companies that can help out.
For those thinking about doing it, the Asia/Africa routes from Europe are much more interesting. Going across the Atlantic or Pacific is much less interesting. Also in the modern age of container freight you don't have much time at the ports, and often the captains are reluctant to let you get off, because they are on such tight schedule and delays would quickly cost 100s of 1000s of dollars per hour (that will give you an idea about the economic impact of this blockage).
My mother actually travelled on a loose cargo freighter in the 90s. That was a completely different experience because you would often have several days or a week at port.
The cost was about $100 / day, but this was almost 10 years ago, so I guess it went up by now. This isn't really competitive as travel, but if you consider the experience of being on a container ship a holiday in itself, the cost was quite reasonable IMO.
There was one other passenger on board, and we could go anywhere on the ship without an escort except the engine room. I really enjoyed it, but its not for everyone as there is no communication / internet access available so you have to be the sort of person who can entertain yourself.
Also wouldn't go if you get seasick easily. Unlike say cruise ships, the crew isn't too worried about passenger comfort, and wil just plow straight through storms.
Ah, that explains it.
> I'm not sure how exciting it would be.
Right now it would be pretty exciting.
Even on the open sea I've never seen that the autopilot actually steers the ship, it will only keep the heading, and sound an alert when there is time to change heading. So the watchkeeping Officer will set new heading and steer the ship in a new direction.
I'm pretty sure that is a feature not a bug. Kinda like servers... if something is exciting it means something went wrong.
Interested to hear if anyone has insights about this
Maersk are entering into block-chain "distributed ledger technology" with IBM and similar modern solutions. But one article put $300 of every $2,000 of shipping costs for administration and paperwork[0].
I think you're right, there is a massive advantage to be had, and companies are chasing that advantage. But from my (tangential logistics) background, even the biggest shipping companies have the usual range of legacy systems, heavy administration overhead, plenty of paperwork, excel-based-tools and huge integration headaches.
0 - https://www.supplychaindigital.com/technology-4/maersk-and-i...
Damn that's a lot. I understand this is a capital intensive industry so I guess it's hard/impossible to get in now but it seems like if someone started a competitor from scratch and had great software as the foundation of their company, they'd make a killing
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter5/air-transpo...
It is a lot more obvious in other fields -- medicine and highly regulated/litigious professions.
If your paperwork is mostly driven by other actors tech probably won’t help all that much. Tech has not made significant inroads in disrupting American health insurance, for example.
The government doesn't seem to consider the huge hidden cost to the businesses in the country this represents, and the businesses haven't been stellar at highlighting it, which I guess is because they mostly just push that cost onto the consumers.
- Every country has different customs regulations, so paperwork is not really that reusable across ports.
- Customs is a huge source of fraud. In poorly managed countries it is one of the prime vectors for bribery and corruption. So destination ports have to verify everything even if they do receive the paperwork, because there’s no trust.
Generally speaking if you want to cut customs red tape your options are some kind of free trade deal (which is not necessarily popular and never covers all types of goods), or banding together with a bunch of different countries to submit to one supranational entity like the EU. In fact we have a live example of how complicated customs arrangements can be; look at how trade from UK to EU has been disrupted by Brexit and the introduction of customs.
It's also not just customs, there are a ton of ancillary processes related to berthing - things like harbor fees, environmental documentation etc.
I know of at least one case where, as recently as ~2015, a shipping company had to keep around old machines with IE8 because that was the only way to interact with authorities at a given port.
"logistics"
"from scratch"
it does not compile, I guess it's just like those ERP Systems - you don't need shitton of domain knowledge, because you need fuckton of domain knowledge and during development you'll learn even more and have to refactor a lot of stuff frequently for edge cases.
This is obviously something that affects how competitive you can be. As an example, our software allowed a customer to go from 5-6 hours of work in their previous application, to less than 10 minutes in ours for a typical workload.
However, a big remaining issue is that there's a lot of local laws and procedures around which are not exposed in a computer-friendly way. If they are computerized they're often old systems with serious limitations.
For example, import declarations in Denmark is limited to only 99 goods items, so consolidation of goods items is almost required, especially in e-commerce settings, which again makes it more difficult if things are re-exported (customer didn't want that jacket say).
This can't be fixed on the commercial side, it requires work by the government agencies.
The market is extremely competitive. We are one of the biggest in the business, and we only capture small percent (I heard 3% before) of market share.
We build event driven systems primarily glued together with Kafka. There are thousands of deployed products.
Our company does have plenty of marketing material of course: https://www.chrobinson.com/en-us/about-us/technology/robinso...
I could ask some of the data science folks I know in the org if they have blogs, I’d be curious about that as well.
We have a blog that slowed down during covid (we’ve been very busy), but here’s one post about a serialization library we open-sourced: https://engineering.chrobinson.com/technology/inside-chr-avr...
http://traffic.libsyn.com/omegataupodcast/omegatau-146-conta...
Also: a plug for Omega Tau, one of my favorite podcasts. https://omegataupodcast.net
Edited to add: go to the Archive page and scroll down. About half the episodes are in English and half in German.
Three I picked out were:
- Existing infrastructure matters (e.g. SuezMax)
- Standards matter (container size and handling needed to be standardized)
- Process matters (e.g. containers needed changes to the way loading and unloading was done, and hence changes to labor agreements, at major ports)
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/three-lessons-from-the-shipping-co...
[1] https://twitter.com/GlobalHogg/status/1374709733614100487
Presumably in the Gulf of Suez.
Edit: so this is the “ever living” that’s 335 meters long. The ever given is 400 meters long
Edit: Comparing with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ship... it might or might not have been the ship. Evergreen is the name of the company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Marine
As of 2330 (GMT+2) M/V EVER GIVEN, no. 5 in the 23rd of March NB convoy remains #grounded in the #SuezCanal.
Vessel no. 6, 7 & 8 will be assisted by tugs back to Suez anchorage area, clearing space for M/V EVER GIVEN to be towed out the same way as she entered once re-floated. https://t.co/ltXEyRZtqX
Looks like it's going to take a while...
"The #grounding of M/V EVER GIVEN in the #SuezCanal has caused transit delays. Current traffic situation is as follows:
71 vessels at Suez Anchorage awaiting NB transit
79 vessels awaiting SB transit of which 34 are anchored at Great Bitter Lake & 45 at Port Said Outer Anchorage"
150 vessels blocked
Edit: Go to https://www.myshiptracking.com/ and use the Playback button with timestamp 23/03/2021 06:15:00 to see the ship drifting left and right.
So likely the ship was uncontrollable and drifted into the bank. There seems to be evidence that there its bulbous bow is embedded in the bank.
In particular, there was one where someone said another ship behind them _also_ lost power/control around the same time and almost rear-ended them. I would really love to find that tweet again.
If the toll is deemed to be too high a vessel always has the option of going around the Cape.
Realistically it's always an option but the added time plus the additional wear on a vessel makes it undesirable.
Maintaining the channel seems to be a lot of work... like when ships crash into the bank and block it.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-suezcanal-ship-rest...
1. How easy would it be to pay a container ship’s captain to do that ? 2. Can you then bet on short term commodity futures to benefits from the event significantly? 3. Do you think this is what’s happening ?
[0]: https://www.reedsmith.com/en/perspectives/2020/10/when-commo... - and the (linked) full judgment is also interesting; the pilot of the ship that caused the collision wasn't doing a good job on that occasion!
In a nutshell you don't stay still, you drift around with wind and currents (and breeze-block shaped ships have a lot of windage!). So you drift off station, motor back, rinse repeat. ('Station' is usually a box you're bound to rather than a point you try to hit, for exactly this reason)
Anchor isn't much different - a cargo ship in an anchorage isn't a static fixture, it's realistically the world's largest windsock.
Compare another ship waiting in the same area - https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000 Hit the "Track" button on the sidebar (under the photo of the ship), and you'll see a similar history. Theirs is tighter, but that could simply be a product of it getting crowded. I'd expect EG's arrival to be more planned, less chaotic - arrive, assemble the convoy, join the queue and go.
https://twitter.com/AgenciesLeth/status/1374708535603433472?...
Live local tide: https://www.tide-forecast.com/locations/Suez-Egypt/tides/lat...
I was able to find news reports of the canal being dredged in 2015 but nothing since then.
edit: I see that they've already had one high tide opportunity which did not dislodge the vessel. From your tide chart link, I can see that the tides get progressively deeper until the end of the month, but that is a long time to be stuck there.
See similar vessels https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/EVER-GIVEN-IMO-9811000-...
The shipping company name “Evergreen” is in huge letters on the side of the ship.
Is there really not a suitably developed Mediterranean port closer to Suez? Is there work on one?
Add to that, the Dutch have been a maritime nation at least since colonial times.
While one of the biggest ports lies at the footsteps of Athens, the economic power of neighbourg countries is not quite as strong.
I'm not sure exactly where the "economic center" of Europe is but maps of gridded GDP [0] or nightlights [1] suggests Rotterdam is a pretty good choice.
(Also don't forget the Alps.)
[0] https://bit.ly/31h1hsK [1] https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2012/03/Night_ligh...
The Twitter account of this transit services agency provides some updates.
I already saw multiple French news sites stating that the canal has been unblocked, but apparently that's not true.
I wonder where that news came from.
2 dredges and a larger tug underway to help unblocking the Ever Given.
The tide is at its highest level of the day. Expecting some action in the next hour!
"DICK"
"Yaa"
"take a look out at starboard"
"OH ma God, it looks like a huge..."
"PECKER, wait, that's not a wood pecker, it looks like someone's..."
"PRIVATES, we have reports of an Unidentified Flying Object, it is a long smooth shaft, complete with..."
"TWO BALLS, what is that? That looks just like an enormous..."
"WANG, pay attention"
"I was distracted by that enormous flying..."
"WILLIE, what's that?"
"Well it looks like a giant..."
"JOHNSON"
"Yes Sir"
"Get on the hold of the British intelligence and let them know about this"
If it remains stuck, perhaps they might need to bring in a suction dredger to work on the area around the bow?
Pow!
> If this AIS track is genuine, the captain of Ever Given has written one hell of a resignation letter... https://twitter.com/TheDreadShips/status/1374654080082120704
I'll kindly ask everyone to refrain from cracking "yo-mamma" jokes. thanks :)
[1] https://www.livewire-connections.com/sites/default/files/fil...
[2] https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/sinking-contai...
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/24/middleeast/suez-canal-con...
Large ships are _heavily_ optimized for the common case, which is sailing at about 13.5 knots. They take a very long time to get up to speed because their propulsion is sized to be just enough to overcome resistance at their typical cruising speed.
Consequently, it would be difficult to get another ship up to any sort of speed in a short enough distance. Even if you could, the the momentum is absurdly high so it's much more likely that any sort of chain would snap, or the attachment point would break than that the aground ship would actually move.
(The aground ship has a deadweight of approx 200,000 tonnes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEDrFiQq1_k
Looks like fun actually!
Similarly, tugs use different propeller setups (e.g. ducted props for extra power, or vectored systems such as azimuth thrusters or cyclorotors for extra manuverability), which just cause extra drag if all you're doing is cruising at a fixed speed throughout oceans.
A big container ship trying to tow something is not unlike having a high-speed racecar spin its wheels. It's not designed to put that torque down at low speed and lift a big trailing mass.
That's why recovery specialists are flying in. They know how to do that kind of engineering calculation, as well as all the weight & balance calcs needed to e.g. move ballast in unusual ways, etc.
TL;DR: Ship has not been refloated, "an initial investigation has ruled out any suggestion of mechanical or technical failure".
How does something like this happen?
> @tjcsalisbury Yepp! And I believe they cut us off this morning entering the canal and then this happened and right after they ran aground the ship behind us lost power and almost hit us so it’s been a fun day lol but now we are just anchored here hopefully it won’t be to long but from the looks of it that ship is super stuck they had a bunch of tugs trying to pull and push it earlier but it was going nowhere there is a little excavator trying to dig out the bow
It essentially plugs a giant oil 'pipeline'
If necessary I guess they’ll have to unload it somehow.
So, another thing to worry about :)
Blow up the locks for the Panama Canal and you have some seriously inconvenienced shipping companies.
But even in both cases the result is that they have to take the long way around. It makes the shipping slower and more expensive, but it was a tiny fraction of your costs to begin with so most companies survive just fine.
I would think someone with a bomb on some kind of bulk Hazmat carrier and the threat of blowing it up would shut down traffic for a lot longer. Nobody is going to want to get close to do anything about it.
LNG or Oil are the two I can think of, but there's probably a lot of other bulk Hazmat carriers.
Someone hijacks a LNG carrier, parks it in the canal and says they have a bomb on the pressure vessel.
Regardless of what infrastructure it would damage or not, it will shut down shipping.
Who would be willing to get close to it to do anything about it? What do you do, stand off and launch a missile and definitely destroy it?
A huge bomb to one side of the canal would displace rock and mud in to the channel and make it shallower. That would be enough to close it to large ships until it could be dredged again.
Although, if terrorists really wanted to wreak havoc in the canal they could scuttle a large ship while it's sailing in it. That would necessitate dismantling and removing the entire thing.
I'm surprised no one has made a movie of that.
> In time, it was possible to reduce the number of crew members on board the ships, and in 1969 the ships were gathered into several groups to further reduce the number of crew necessary for their upkeep. Those crew that were left to maintain the vessels were rotated every three months. In 1972, the last crew members of the German ships were finally sent home, with the maintenance of the ships left to a Norwegian company.
They even introduced a postal system!
That is pretty cool.
I remember back in the early 90s attending a CEBIT trade show (at the time perhaps the largest computing show in the world -- the show floors covered acres) and being astonished to see that the Bundespost delivered mail, including the usual trade show flyers, to each display booth. Yes, uniformed postal workers wheeling the usual delivery carts up and down the aisles.
I think we forget how important transporting physical media (usually just paper) was back in those days. The penny post used to deliver twice a day in cities. Now I check my mail every 4-6 weeks and there's rarely anything important in it.
Well, it terrorizes. Terror not achieving anything is a bold statement. Maybe you'd prefer to argue that it's not efficient or productive.
I don't claim to understand the global shipping dynamics, but I do see that there's lots of frustrated ship crews with nowhere to go, because of the pandemic.
It's pretty insane that I can track what ship is where on the other side of the planet in real time.
They even found debris from it in the places they expected: https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/searching-for-mh370-two-y...
Airplanes have ADS-B, which is quite similar to the maritime AIS location broadcasting. The only significant difference is that satellite AIS coverage is high and ships don't go fast, so having no signal for a few hours is not as big a problem for ships.
ADS-B satellite coverage is currently provided by (at least) the iridium constellation, but that only came into effect in 2016.
I wonder if, if you're a container ship leaving China today, headed for Europe, if it makes sense to head for Panama instead, purely on the metric of time, or if you're still better off either rounding Africa or just waiting for the Suez to clear.
(I assume from a fuel/logistics point it is cheapest just to wait.)
You are thinking of the wrong channel.
[0] https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal#Capacity
Someone with insider knowledge: is this a typo or similar error? How does it happen and proliferate without being corrected?
"Ever Given" is the name of the ship and written in smaller font on the bow and (always) on the stern.
scroll down to #13 and read the names of the sister ships. The evergreen shipping line has 7 identical ships named "Ever XXX"
A bit like how a tiny bat (citation needed?) changed the course of the world for at least a year.
Kinda like how the Mink was going to become the bridge-species in Denmark (humans infected Minks with COVID19... and then the mink was probably going to infect another species after that).
Out of curiosity - are bats affected by these coronaviruses? If not, what's different about bats (as compared to humans)?
Humans with a pipette.
Do you mean some production would shift to Africa, or something else?
Though maybe I've got the scale wrong, and these ships can just buy more fuel and more food at their departure ports and go around Africa without stopping...