It 'Might Take Weeks' to Free Ship Stuck in Suez Canal
npr.org
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Suez canal blocked by a massive ship - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560319 - March 2021 (419 comments)
Also ongoing:
Is that ship still stuck? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282 - March 2021 (446 comments)
Suez Canal: How are they trying to free the Ever Given? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586278 - March 2021 (44 comments)
It took a REALLY long time to salvage that cruise ship that ran aground in the med and fell on it side.
First, hook up several tugboats. Second, put a couple of big ships on each side of the Ever Given, maybe a couple miles out. At the count of 3, the big ships haul ass towards the middle. It creates a huge wave that floats the Ever Given up away from the sand, and the tugboats pull it out.
It might be slightly dangerous.
I write software and have no experience doing what I'm suggesting.
I'm guessing that would take more than weeks to actually do.
This should be attached to a lot of posts here.
It’s the desert though. There are no anchor points to attach anything to (and for something this heavy, you’d need so many to split the force that you’d run out of blocks).
As an enhancement - use multiple ships in series (there's no shortage at either end). Each ship adding a bit more more energy to the wave as it passes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_sh...
I'm not in this business so I personally never thought about it. but it seems analogous to not maintaining backups with billions of dollars at stake.
can't wait to watch the Netflix special about how they did it.
Cut everything they can from the inside, seal the bulkhead, then cut the outer hull from the outside, and bob's your uncle.
Then they could leave the bow embedded there as a reminder to others not to f* up.
0: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/3/25/suez-blockage-se...
Lower value goods will just be delayed. Bulk cargoes especially. Expect shortages and price rises of oil, coal, iron ore, etc.
Ships will divert round Africa. That will increase fuel costs, increase shipping time by about 3 weeks, and reduce shipping capacity.
I don't think we're skimping out on work and equipment here when there's hundreds of millions of dollars at stake for the canal company, hundreds of billions for the world economy, and the incalculable strategic value the canal has for the various world powers.
A ship carrying a bunch of barrels of oil or whatnot is in a lock and needs to be unloaded. There is no crane and people are lazy. Given the current distance between the deck of the ship and the ground, the current draft of the ship and the triangle of its hull, and the shape and level of water in the lock....
How many barrels do you have to push over the side to lighten the boat and also raise level of water in the lock until you can unload the rest of the barrels by rolling them down a ramp to shore?
Seal up the topmost closest to density of water containers, attatch a line to them,push them off to lighten the ship and raise the level of water in the lock until the ship floats. Retrieve the cargo later. heh.
Then again, I couldn't figure out the correct answer to that spherical cow question back then and probably still can't.
You could also maybe flood the lock with oil which should be plentiful as long as it's still dense enough to be lighter than the ship. Let the ship float away on oil until it's straightened out, then clean up the oil mess and Bob's your uncle.
If only spherical cows.
If that's the case, can't they just bomb the ship and be over with it? Maybe don't even bother to unload the cargo, take the fuel and oil out, take the potentially hazardous materials out, take the high value and easily movable items out, destroy the blockage and start a clean up effort with priority of just opening the passage.
Too blunt? Well, that's how we deal with blockages all the time. Probably it is is within the realm of the military tech and operational capabilities, just a matter of cost and time making sense.
If you drop massive ordnance on that thing, it's going to spread debris everywhere. The canal is very shallow and narrow compared to the size of ships that traverse it. This pretty much guarantees a field of debris that will damage other ships if it isn't cleaned up. Cleaning it up will take far longer, and during that time the canal will not be usable.
If you try a targeted approach, with relatively small explosives to break the ship into pieces, then you'll have huge sunken pieces that you have to move, which will be much harder than just spending the time and effort to dig out and tug away the intact ship.
This is all way outside my area of expertise, so maybe I'm wrong. Still, I'll be surprised if blowing it up turns out to be the chosen solution.
Maybe use shaped charges to detonate the containers to remove weight so that the ship can float? The containers themselves are not that large, maybe container debris in the bottom of the canal is not a big deal?
Of course I'm not an expert too, but it's entertaining to consider the more edgy solutions.
Someone else suggested to pump air into the sand/soil to cause a liquefaction that can help to unstuck the ship.
I'm sure actual expert are working on the subject, so no harm done in entertaining more extreme solutions.
Is this a typo or have they conflated pull strength with weight? Most tugboats can obviously pull far bigger ships than that.
One extreme is a ship going from Egypt to Egypt, with nearly 100% of the desired journey being the canal.
Another possibility is Perth to Miami. That one can easily go either way around Antarctica, and if the ship is small enough it can go eastbound through the Panama Canal.
A less extreme example would be Singapore to Boston.
Shipping experts said that if the canal can't be cleared in the next 24 to 48 hours, vessels plying routes between Europe and Asia may be forced to divert around Africa — adding up to 12 days to the journey.