Is that ship still stuck?
istheshipstillstuck.com
istheshipstillstuck.com
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.
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.
It's amazing that more ships are not simply sailing around Africa.
(tens of thousands of dollars just for fuel each day)
There's actually a robust and competitive market for intercontinental shipping canals:
https://www.industryweek.com/ideaxchange/article/21965825/su...
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
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.
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.
>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
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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_t...
Also, I think shipping is about to get more expensive, I guess.
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.
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 .
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/sail-area
I think they have no idea at this moment as the tugs can't get it done.
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.
Because that would all be a tremendous waste of money, and would not get the ship any closer to being free.
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...
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.
Although I suspect you don't want to repeat that trick too many times without serious inspection/maintenance.
Hooking them up to a helicopter would be a slow, dangerous process as well.
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.)
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.
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.
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...
That said, taking off some containers is a viable option but it'll probably have to wait for a crane ship to arrive.
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.
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?
I think you just need a smaller crane ship to transfer the cargo e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliary_crane_ship
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.
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.
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.
Maybe bring another Evergreen ship there and move containers onto it...?
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.
Just cut the tip off.
But also curious of the bulb can be removed without affecting the integrity.
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.
Filling in the entire canal is unrealistic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Relevant feedback on pro's/cons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26587692
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.
[1]Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azEvfD4C6ow
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. :-(
"Why don't you just" get a bunch of people on rafts and row real fast to push it off?
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.
... 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.
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. :)
"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.
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?”
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.
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)
The threads are not particularly interesting because people make the same suggestions over and over again.
"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?"
Or just tow it outside the environment...
For those who haven't seen this video... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
For example I'd try to attach a two Raptor engines to the ship and blow it back to the water :)
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
Maybe if you kill the ship it respawns at its port of origin?
That said, the ones mentioned there don't pass the smell test.
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.
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.
https://www.tradewindsnews.com/casualties/salvors-warn-ever-...
Edit: Something like this https://www.hydrologicalsolutions.com/aqua-barrier-cofferdam...
I am excited to see how they will solve the problem though!
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Project Orion did contemplate a 400m diameter ship weighing 8 million tons....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
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.
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.
Excavate sand around + weight from ship pancakes sand its sitting on, gradually = ship lowers back to floating depth
Also, I doubt the sand goes down very deep...this is a costal area, not rolling dunes. You're going to hit rock quickly.
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?
You're basically asking why can't they just make a whole new canal in less than a week?
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).
This is the kind of job you want to get right the first time.
But you would have to take great care to prevent it from rolling over, so you probably can't lift it up too far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Concordia_disaster#Salva...
[1] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/best-shot-at-unblocking-suez...
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.
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.
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.
An atom bomb would certainly clear the canal, but what of the cost?
Here's a drone video I took today!
I didn't realize they were water-filled!
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!
If you had this, then I would damn each side and pump water INTO that space. Raise water level, ship frees. Boom
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.
I'm not saying it was aliens, but... it was aliens.
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...
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?
The news barons of the past foolishly conflated the two, or at least assumed the first was optimal at producing the second.
Today, we’ve learned better — there are far more effective strategies available, largely by exploiting our natural search for drama.
That is, the reporting was good at its goal of good reporting; but this was not the correct goal to have.
Yes let's blow up a whale, beached as. What could possibly go wrong? Remains to be seen.
In contrast, points and longevity serve as a rough, very-democratic measure of a poster's cumulative contributions to the community here, and thus (indirectly) of how well the poster has grokked the local cultural norms. That, in turn, gives readers useful information about the weight that they might wish to consider giving to the view(s) expressed by the poster.
(Apropos of which: I see that you still have a total of -1 points for the all of five days that your account has been active.)
Then came back just then after a few busy days and had to do a massive double take at the number of upvotes; I probably shouldn't discuss the actual number, but it's my most upvoted reply ever - there must be a lot more punsters here! :)
I used the reference to the NZ "Beached As" due to its brilliance, if you haven't seen it it's a silly treat especially if you love the accent.
And again I greatly enjoyed that sardonic tone of the original video, which I saved for future repeats.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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#:~:text=I....
The idea that there's any quick way to manage the cargo of this ship is 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?
'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 :)
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.
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.
My intuition is that at the scale of ship, and the canal, “a few lorry loads” is not going to have any noticeable effect.
For kick of initial momentum, I suggest nuclear weapons.
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.
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.
Something like that, but redirected under the ship: https://youtu.be/BIoBGZLc7wM?t=184
This is such a good idea that it actually exists and works.
Look up water injection dredging.
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?photoid=...
No. Helicopters. 10 helis, 1 container/sortie, 10 sorties/hour = 10000 containers 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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit. Okay "ends".
It is crosswise and in the banks on both sides.
Realistic headline: As more of the bow and stern are freed from sand, ship suddenly lists and dumps 5000 containers into the canal.
That would obviously be catastrophic.
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.
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.
Turns out: the container ship __itself__ is the easiest way to move all of that debris out. And its already packed and loaded.
> the container ship __itself__ is the easiest way to move all of that debris out.
Well, evidently not if it is stuck.
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.
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).
Like that old Mythbusters episode where they blow up a car twice
I think the Earth could use just ONE MORE nuclear crater..
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.
Modern weapons can be very clean. :]
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.
I say build a trebuchet on deck and start launching containers into the desert.
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.
Don't forget to sell the containers as NFTs.
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
Shipping company should know exact weights of each container for this and billing reasons.
The lift capability of this setup is from the y axis. But at a reduced load. This is a physics problem.
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
And this assumes that the containers are indeed loaded to their full weight 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.
Nope 300k appr ! https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-practices/cluster-larg...
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?
Then a week of bombardment. Still impressive.
And a good photo to confirm your 28 bow-to-stern number: https://photos.fleetmon.com/vessels/ever-given_9811000_26410...
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.
When they’re unloaded, I don’t see a massive empty frame, so unframing is done at some level.
http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/the-dirt-dances....
What's with the many joucular/tounge-in-cheek posts on this thread..
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.
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...
Hell, a big enough explosion might prevent ships from ever getting stuck at that spot again.
How the insurance would be settled would be interesting, I suppose it'd be the same as though the cargo was blown overboard.
Of course there is the “what is physically possible” and “what is politically doable” and there maybe a bit of a gulf there.
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 ;)
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.
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)
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.
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...
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.
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.
There was a sea basing study and that only looked at 20ft containers and dismissed even a theoretical upgraded CH-53X (although of course the study was looking at much longer range than just lifting it and putting it back down) but again, that was just 20ft, these 40ft ones are just too heavy for choppers.
A writeup https://www.aerotime.aero/27542-Could-helicopters-solve-the-... if anything, the Royal Jordanian Air Force operates two Mi-26s but
> For many containers, using helicopters would probably mean at least partially unloading their cargo, which is a difficult and time-consuming endeavor. The process of removing containers by helicopters would be even more difficult, dangerous, and time-consuming, so it is very, very unlikely we will see it implemented unless the situation gets really desperate.
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.
I'd buy a plane ticket to Suez to see that. Or even pay for a proper 4k stream of the event.
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.
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-...
Spoken like a true programmer :) That's incredibly difficult and dangerous.
It would sound like a massive angry swarm of bees.
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.
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..
Depending on the temperature as the site, that could be a lot lower.
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).
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?
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.
Sounds like efforts are going into offloading fuel and water tanks while they continue to dig up sand.
Losing a few percent of weight in cargo is worth it.
But in real life these things aren't optimal ;)
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?
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...
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...
Suez Canal
Panama Canal
Straight of Gibraltar- I think
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.
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...
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.
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.
I'll start with my guess: A long time
US Military is probably the only entity that could pull this off in a timely manner. At great cost of course...
Russian Military has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-26
That's the one they've used to rescue downed US helicopters :)
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.
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.
-- 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 µ=0.5 and F=µR [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...
Like this: https://jalopnik.com/a-chain-just-cut-through-a-capsized-car...
...
/s
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.
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
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.
https://www.tide-forecast.com/locations/Suez-Egypt/tides/lat...
You're an optimist, that's for sure.
The interesting thing for me is going to be where that ship goes if they manage to re-float it.
Suez canal seems to be a Single Point of Failure.
Seems pretty quick to setup and do assuming there are helicopters that can move that weight.
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
I'm curious how much of this is hightide vs low. If the photo is taken at low tide you have about 1.7m drop on the stern which is going to make it look far more stuck. While if the photo is at high tide, wow.
> And what happens when that causes you to rip a hole into the hull of the ship?
I cant see sand friction ripping a hole in the steel unless there are rocks in the mix. I think the bigger risk is cracking the hull if there is too much weight at the front vs displacing this across the entire hull.
> I don't think you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship.
To this, while absolutely it huge infrastructure Im assuming they only intends to reduce weight, not unload. So some crane choppers or whatever can make a big difference taking off 5% of containers type thing. I even wonder if they want to keep the back loaded to effectively life the front... but that might exacerbate the risk of hull breakage?
I now wonder how regularly Gell-Mann Amnesia occurs for people on HN, really.
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
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.
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...
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
That's an interesting way to say tax evasion.
The term you’re looking for is “tax avoidance”.
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.
The UAE used several sand-vacuuming ships to build their artificial islands, wouldn't those do the job?
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.
However, blowing up the ship is likely to create a even bigger mess, so that is the biggest reason that it is still there.
However, the ship is more important then the cargo according to maritime law. The commander have the right to let go of the cargo if there is a need.
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
Edward Teller: How big is Antarctica?
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.
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.
that was the very same ship
EDIT: no, the incident needing 12 tugs was a different ship. see comment below.
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.
>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/List_of_largest_container_ship...
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
In this case, 400m is the max length required for the Suez (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suezmax)
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.
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).
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.
Correct me if I’m wrong but Hacker News isn’t comprised solely of software engineers.
The complexity of life throws a wrench into everything.
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.
Brilliant!
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
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.
Light boats are less stable. One of the few that could make this situation worse would be the damn thing capsizing.
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.
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...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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!
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)
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.
Since the static force in opposition won't contribute towards upward motion you actually need to supply the full amount of force to lift it - not just enough to barely nudge the need by .00001 m/s^2
In terms of whether that force would cause any effect the answer is yes (because everything is an effect) and effectively no since as ridiculously heavy as this container ship is it is absolute peanuts compared to the mass of the earth nuclear explosions that produce megatons of force are still immensely negligible, ditto for super massive volcanoes. A volcanic explosion large enough to derail the earth's rotation by a day would definitely be an extinction level event for all of the complex life forms on earth. But, that said, every little thing does contribute in its little way.
Lastly - yea, the presence of locks in the panama canal does mean that ships are regularly accelerated upwards and downwards without any noticeable effect - if that change in elevation was executed by explosives or chinooks there would be slight variations in the force but they'd be mostly inconsequential on the scale of things.
Actually it is:
https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/einsteins-experimental-...
Let's just nuke it, them nuclear weapons have to be disposed of somehow, and the channel needs some expansion, it seems.
Use musk's starship and you need >166 of them...
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...
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
Probably more expensive than most other solutions, and I doubt that the Evergiven will be in a good condition afterwards.
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.
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.
If you actually want to accelerate it upward to any meaningful speed, you'd need even more power.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
The ship’s a total loss, but Egypt also gets a new lake!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Area_Development_Pr...
This thing is truly massive.
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.
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.
In fact we can't find him anywhere...
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)
She's been down that rabbit hole ever since reading about the Beeple piece.
But no, in the end it was just another crypto scam.
An NFT is about marketing. The products value is how well the product is marketed and nothing else. It’s purified capitalism!
Then I would create an rss feed of each site and subscribe to them.
Actually I would need more sites under that method: an 8 room house would need a site for each side of the 4/4 split, then another for each 2/2 split, then 1 for each room.
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.
I’m eager to see what clever solution the engineers eventually pick.
At that point, you may as well have begun digging a new canal anyways.
[1] https://www.tellerreport.com/business/2021-03-26-the-dredgin...
"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."
I'm sure the overwhelming scale is reduced at this proximity.
I always love sites that are question in the domain with answers in the webpage as the main content.
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.
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.
See the "Broadcast information" section.
Position, heading, speed, unique ID, etc. are all broadcast "every 2 to 10 seconds".
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 ;-)
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...
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"..
Not only that, but Bloomberg terminals have the ship locations in real time because it impacts trading a lot: Petrol, ore, cereals, etc.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...
The Army Corps of Engineers can build waterways and levies like it's nobody's business.
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
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...
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.
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.
> 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
Days of partying in the desert, opening random containers, driving little excavators. What a blast it would be!
Ever Given (Suezmax limit)
length: 399.94 m (400 m)
tonnage: 199,629 DWT (200,000 DWT)[0] NSFW https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqwn8/suez-canal-ms-ever-gi...
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.
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.
https://twitter.com/kelleyrobinson/status/137519912243366298...
In the future, could they perhaps widen the canal and disallow ships large enough to block it?
Yes, it is expensive. But not as expensive as having a canal blocked is for the world economy and the Egyptian government.
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.
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.
Evergreen is the company that owns (manages?) the ship
Another similar one is http://www.isnasdaqopen.com/ This tells your if the stock market is open or not
Deal with getting this ship unstuck in parallel.
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?
(If you think it's that easy, pop over and ask if you can have a go on the JCB)
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?
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.
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.
- 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.
And all you have to remove it is a pin. So, this is going to take a while.
Smit will be making bank on this.
I think it's just going to take time and lots of digging.
Best to take it slow and steady.
Or is this a problem that money alone can't solve?
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-...
Is it common at all to get containers off a ship outside of docking areas?
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-26
It will take time but that thing has the capacity.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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)
Considering it earns $10B/year to Egypt, I don't know if this short downtime will justify the cost to them.
Many bulk carriers exceed Suezmax limits and can't go trough.
> 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.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7719176/suez-canal-ship-digger-ex...
https://twitter.com/kelleyrobinson/status/137519912243366298...
Granted they might have to dredge to clear that sand out of the canal.
Surely it's been thought of....
They could have two lanes of concrete-lined canal I'm sure, but it's just a ditch with a tiny excavator.
$9bn in 2014
This way it will increase the depth and width of the canal just where it is needed.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Authority#:~:text=I...
Oh, and some of the goods may even be perishable, so they may be lost completely...
I’m essentially wondering why this is more cost-effective than building more, smaller ships.
I thought I remember reading that this ship was designed to meet the Suez canal specs.
( I'm joking, do not take this as a serious solution )
Haha, no. Just no.
The length of the whole canal is 200km and it took 10 years to build. I don't claim that it's exactly linear, but it sounds reasonable to assume a few weeks for just a 1km segment. The soil is soft and the canal isn't deep.
One could imagine 15 pile drivers pounding on the shore and a couple of tugs reversing the ship.
If we're talking weeks to get unstuck, they better head around the tip of Africa.
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.
First I thought this was hilarious. I hit back again which took me to the istheshipstillstuck.com.
To confirm, I tried the above routine again. And it won't take me to the rickroll video anymore! I am not sure what's happening.
Has this happened to anybody else? What's going on? I'm using the Brave browser on Android (whatever the latest flavor is on Samsung devices). It's hilarious, but it also makes me concerned. Anybody?
The vessel name (on the bow) is Ever Given.
The company operating it, emblazoned on the side in large letters, is Evergreen.
Like how some people name all their kids with the same first letter. I know, weird.
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?
If it wasn't clear the whole "lift it with a balloon" thing was a joke though
Writing off the entire ship would cost far less than the delays cost in a day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDQrUiCd61U
Or Volvo trucks?
The ship isn’t going anywhere. It will need to be disassembled.
I just noted this here: https://github.com/grischard/osm-lacking-attribution/issues/...
It's nowhere close to floating currently, and a ship can't be pulled with arbitrarily large forces without damage.
It's easier to lighten the ship.
The GP is only the second such suggestion I see here. The first was on the second sub-page of comments (close to a comment about lifting the ship with a hydrogen balloon, for a search term; combining them is where I got the water balloon idea in stead of sandbags). Mine would have been the third.
Quite honestly and seriously seems far from unfeasible. And perhaps, depending on how fast you can get enough sandbags (or just the bags; sand should be available nearby?), tarpaulins, and pumps there, faster than most other suggestions.
Better yet just hire dozens and wait until one shakes something loose that way he can substantiate his bullshit before he spews it.
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.
I like movies where I can suspend belief (monsters and giant robots), but I hate it when they get the regular real stuff wrong.
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.
(Realistically, Egypt would probably use bulldozers if they actually wanted to go that route.)
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.
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).
https://worldarchitecture.org/architecture-news/ccehp/strait...
And what government would cave to whats essentially a minor inconvenience
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).
Of course it won't help this ship, but at least the canal functions.
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.
Where have we heard this before? Oh yeah - Elon Musk rescuing people from a flooded cave.
Before you downvote, do the math.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
this seems excessive, if they made 400M in trade per hour that would be 3T per year, but Egypt's GDP is ~1T.