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ksec

~15% of the World's trade is dependent on it and this is taking much longer than expected. Why?

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Nine women can't make a baby in a month. Some things just take time, regardless of how much resources you throw at it.

> Nine women can't make a baby in a month. This is my new favorite phrase.

Somebody just have to come up with a good idea.... IE: blow up a boat load of C4 on the side of it...

I'm pretty certain if you nuked the container ship you'd solve the first problem - it'd be messy and expensive but if you could explosively throw chunks out of the canal you could probably resume service.

And just imagine how badass the canal would look if we glassed the banks and lined them with some LEDs!

(please don't do this)

I think you might inadvertently create a few new problems if you did this.

I was thinking the same thing - that glassed canal would probably be so scenic that you'd cause several future traffic jams from private vessels and romantic cruises charting a path through the already near-capacity canal.

The canal is just 10 metres deeper than the ship and it's more than 10 metres high, so just blowing up the ship is not enough to clear the canal. You also need to take away the 200 million kg of steel afterwards. At that point it's easier to just wait for the Really Big Tugboats to come over.

not if you blow up so hard that there is a massive crater. Then let nature fill it up. Isn't the canal connected to large waterways on both ends

Something like this? Is this why they’ve asked all other ships to back up? https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1699656-world-war-iii

Worst case you end up with a nice replacement for Arecibo.

Just in case you are not joking, what do you think blowing up C4 at the side of the ship would achieve?

Yeah joking, but if the ship could survive the blast, maybe it could move the boat or move the dirt that is keeping it still

That's not exactly the problem here.

You can dance on your head as hard as you can but nine women won't make a baby in one month.

It's stuck like a couch in a stairwell.

Except it's a couch with a bulbous bow that got buried into the side of the stairwell, which just happens to be made of clay. I assume the stern is stuck, too.

And all you have to remove it is a pin. So, this is going to take a while.

Do you think getting David Schwimmer to come yell "Pivot!" would help?

Oh, dear. Time travelers really ought to be more careful.

Yeah, they forgot their towel.

Pivot!

My question, for those who know more about this domain than me, is this a problem that enough money could fix? If the governments of the world wrote a $1 trillion blank check, would that be enough to get the ship out in the next 24 hours?

Or is this a problem that money alone can't solve?

We're discussing a ship that is 400 metres long, 59 metres wide, and has a draft of 16 metres[0]. It's carrying somewhere over 18,000 containers, each of which could weight up to 27,000 kg[1]. It's unlikely that all of them weigh that much, but still, they can be heavy.

The load has been very carefully placed on the ship to ensure maximum stability. So the heavy loads are probably deeper in the hull and the lighter loads are higher up. When ships get unloaded in port, it's unlikely that all the containers are for that port, so an intricate dance starts - offloading some containers, moving other ones to maintain the balance, and loading new ones. At all times, you have to keep the load within tolerances so that your ship doesn't go "I'm out!" and roll over.

So yeah, money alone can't solve this in 24 hours. They've got to calculate the load changes when they offload containers, so that you don't accidentally cause the ship to roll over in the canal. You're not going to stop that happening with a few bits of rope tied to some concrete pillars in the ground..

[0] https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/EVER-GIVEN-IMO-9811000-...

[1] https://www.dsv.com/en/our-solutions/modes-of-transport/sea-...

And as a bit more context, the cranes that are used at ports are capable of moving 60+ tonnes[0] - physics becomes a bit of a problem when your crane is a lever..

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_crane

Is it even that easy to get any containers off the ship, without the machinery and infrastructure at ports?

Is it common at all to get containers off a ship outside of docking areas?

Well, they fall off of ships all the time, especially in rough weather (all the time is hyperbole, but it absolutely happens). So sure, you can probably push one off with a pretty big lever, but shipping containers are actually designed to "clip" together to an extent, to make the load more solid. Problem is, the canal is only about 24 metres deep, so you're going to end up blocking the canal with containers instead if you just push them off.

The modern shipping world is all about containers, container cranes, and container ships. 99 Percent Invisible hosted some episodes of the Containers podcast [0] that will probably provide some insight.

0: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/containers-ships-tugs...

This baby can do it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-26

It will take time but that thing has the capacity.

Certainly not common, but it can be done with specialized vessels.

I'm also just speculating but my understanding is that there is already a lot of money behind this and that it simply takes time for companies specialized in salvaging ships to physically get there with their equipment and also develop a solution that works.

I don't think more money would make those companies work faster and I don't think there is some reasonable alternative solution available other than using these companies.

There is a limited number of people that have the expertise, and equipment to pull it off, and it takes them time even if they had been standing by at the accident site. Money isn't the issue right now. I'm a mariner, but not a salvage law expert, but the ship and the cargo on it are effectively the collateral for whoever removes this thing, so money is likely not an issue.

This is now an engineering and logisitics problem. What is necessary for the ship to be floating again? And what equipment is needed for that to happen? If it isn't already at hand, how can they get the equipment there (there is navigable water nearby, but there may be no way to unload heavy equipment onto the land).

Money can do very little here. The problem is, the solution probably requires rather heavy equipment. Like floating cranes to unload the containers or giant excavators. This equipment exists and the costs for doing the operations would be miniscule compared to the costs of the blocked channel. But the problem is moving such equipment to Egypt. These floating cranes might be in the Netherlands right now and the only way to get them to Suez is to drive them there at perhaps 20kph. So it could take like 2 weeks at minimum to get the equipment there. This is a very fundamental problem. Transport by road or railroad still would take like a week but is limited to things which are not much larger than containers and the maximum weight a helicopter can lift is like 10 tons. The largest aircraft can lift over 300 tons but only as long as the freight fits into the aircraft. Oh, and there is only one of it :p. So anything larger has to literally shipped to the location. The only good news is, the site is reachable by oceangoing vessels :)

So there are two fundamental challenges:

- come up with a good plan how to get the ship out of there

- transport the necessary equipment quickly to the site. This step can easily take weeks.

Well it's a question of odds. Hard to imagine you couldn't get a big auger, drill a bunch of holes, put a bunch of telephone poles into the holes and start running steel cables + winch from each one to the end of the ship. Repeat on the other end of the canal/ship and start applying ever more force to realign the ship with the canal.

Question is, what would happen? Would the ship move the sand it's embedded in, realign with the deepest part of the channel and move off?

Or would the (potentially already damaged) hull breach?

For $1trn you could maybe nuke it and then rebuild the ship plus adjacent bits of Egypt? I'm not sure health and safety would approve.

At some point no amount of money is enough to overcome Physics.

Let the answers to your question be a caution to all the Musk and Star Trek fans around here: like this ship, not matter how much money you throw at mars terra-forming, FTL drives and climate change reversal or control technology some things have non-negotiable deadlines.

For real. Why haven’t they just mobilized hacker news?

"We should take the ship, AND PUSH IT SOMEWHERE ELSE" :D [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0sTNLdNhuE

You can trust that I don’t need to follow that link, brother.

So yes it affects a lot of trade. But it can be worked around. Ships can sail around Africa or goods can be shipped across the Pacific and across the Panama Canal or via rail across America. Obviously those are more expensive, but the goods will still be transported.

Because it's, you know, stuck. If they accidentally sink it, the cleanup will be even more messy.

I think it would be very, very difficult to sink. Quite aside from the (hopefully) large number of bulkheads and other such safety measures, the ship will be close to maximum draft for the canal and as such would only be able to sink a metre or two anyway. True, you'd then need to refloat it in situ, which would not be fun ... and it would probably just become more stuck rather than less.

I think it's just going to take time and lots of digging.

Yes, it probably wouldn’t irreparably sink or something like that. Still, specialized recovery work would take even more time. Not to mention the possibility of containers falling down.

Best to take it slow and steady.

Suez canal is 24 meters deep. i count 9 iso containers stacked high on the deck (an iso container is 2.59m high).

Smit will be making bank on this.

One of the largest ships in the world has run aground. How long did you expect it would take to salvage it?

Extrapolating from the 2014 extensions, building a 2nd backup canal would cost >$8B.

Considering it earns $10B/year to Egypt, I don't know if this short downtime will justify the cost to them.

It is costing much more than that to shipping companies and the broader industry. If that is an option, I am sure they’ll find the money. That probably would take much longer than un-sticking the ship, assuming this is possible.

Much longer than expected by whom? Have you seen some scenario planning documentation by canal authorities or others for this sort of situation? Or what are you basing you claim on?

Because it’s hard

Just dig a new canal around the ship?

A quarter mile diversion can't take that long to dig. The whole canal is 120 miles, so an extra quarter mile they should be able to dig in a few days I would think?

This sounds eerily similar to "Just add the new feature, it can't take that long". Things are complicated.

I mean it is just typing... how hard can it be?

Volume is ^3 of the linear size. To get a clear picture of how much it is do this:

- launch minecraft in creative mode and make 40x40 pad of steel blocks, 1 block high. You should do it in a few minutes.

- now do a 40x40x40 cube. Good luck for the rest of your day.

"Quarter mile" is a linear dimension. What is the width?

If you had to estimate the volume of earth in that 'quarter mile', and then estimate the size of an excavator bucket, and the capacity of a dump truck, and the availability of all those things at any given time (even if you ship them in), you'd soon realize that just digging out that earth will take more time.

On top of that, there's going to be FLOW in the canal - what will your diversion to for erosion, pressure on the locks, etc.

You risk damaging the canal itself to deal with a temporary problem if you think you can just 'dig around it' in 5 days. My bet is you've never seen how long it takes to plan something with this much risk involved.

This isn't software, you aren't going to Agile it away if you screw it up.

This man doesn't infrastructure.

(If you think it's that easy, pop over and ask if you can have a go on the JCB)

I actually spent a few weeks of my life driving a JCB commercially...

> The whole canal is 120 miles, so an extra quarter mile they should be able to dig in a few days I would think?

Uh, what? Why would the length of the canal as a whole tell you anything about how long digging a quarter-mile section would take? If the canal as a whole was longer or shorter, would that somehow change your estimate?

Yes it would... I know the suez canal was a once-per-century type infrastructure investment for Egypt. Doing that same investment again probbaly isn't feasible. But doing 0.2% of the work again is starting to sound pretty affordable...

> suez canal was a once-per-century type infrastructure investment for Egypt.

Once-per-century investment for France. It was, like the Eurotunnel, nominally privately funded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Company but with significant political cover.

Just get people who know what they are doing to sort it out.

Lol no

Sounds easier to just dig through the ship.

You're swapping moving a mostly hollow ship with containers for moving a far larger volume of solid earth.

"Just" widen the canal so it can continue pivoting around the most stuck end until its straight again.

~30% of World container traffic goes trough it.

Many bulk carriers exceed Suezmax limits and can't go trough.

Is this taking longer than expected?

Because your expectations were far too high.

because it's "cheaper" to build a SPOF and then handle the exceptions when they come.

Ship is no longer on the happy path.

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