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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

The Dutch national news had an interview with the CEO of Boskalis, which is the company hired to unlodge the ship. They have one team on the ground atm and another building computer simulations exactly to calculate how much oil and ballast they can pump out (to lighten the ship up and make it easier to tow) without endangering the stability of the ship.

Apparently they had a similar case (same size of ship) a few years back on the Elbe in Germany, in the end it took 12 (!) of the largest tugs they had to get it loose.

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do you mean this case? https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/frachter-rammt-faehre-knapp-an-d...

that was the very same ship

EDIT: no, the incident needing 12 tugs was a different ship. see comment below.

This gave me a good laugh.

Oh my god who is driving this thing?

When the wind picks up, nobody, which seems to be the problem.

Reminds me of this which happened last year:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/truck-crash-causes-havoc-on-au...

Freak gust of wind tipped a truck over on a major bridge taking out a support beam. Took weeks to fix and jammed up traffic really bad.

Shit happens.

Thats.. almost literally unbelievable. I almost want to suspect that that's a code name? For any sufficiently large ship that blocks a major waterway? Incredible.

Perhaps Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses is driving this one.

Very strange that it was the same ship, very strange!

I don't read German, but I can find reports of the same SIZE chip getting stuck on the Elbe and requiring 12 tugs to free it. The ship was called the CSCL Indian Ocean.

yep, thanks

>On February 3, 2016 CSCL Indian Ocean grounded in the River Elbe, while approaching Hamburg, Germany. Her rudder controls were reported to have malfunctioned. It took almost a week to free her from the sandbank, because she grounded at high-tide. Her fuel was unloaded, and she was finally freed, February 9, six days later, during the next spring tide. Twelve tugboats were required to assist in freeing her. Two dredgers had helped cut away at the sandbank, near the grounding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSCL_Indian_Ocean

Sounds quite similar. This one also grounded at a high tide but a higher one is coming.

Is that ship abnormally large or something or is this just a super wild coincidence?

It is one of the largest container ships in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ship...

Why are all these within a few cm of 400m? Is there something special about this length?

From the article:

Furthermore, some of the world's main waterways such as the Suez Canal and Singapore Strait also restrict the maximum dimensions of a ship that can pass through them

There are limits to how big a ship can be and still transit a specific route, usually defined by the radius of curves in a canal or the length of a lock.

In this case, 400m is the max length required for the Suez (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suezmax)

And again a strong wind was blamed. Maybe there's a limit to how big these ships can be built?

the problem was the slow speed. i think even a small ship gets pushed by the wind at slow speeds. however a small ship can speed up faster, and it doesn't cause as much damage if it does crash into something.

I’ve always wondered what something like this costs and who is responsible for paying the bill?

I have the same question. I would think EverGreen as they are the root cause of problem. And it seems they cause regularly. (similar thing happened a few years ago by the very same ship)

Do you have a citation I can see? This isn't me challenging your assertion, I'm just interested to see what happened :)

Not the previous commenter but it's linked in the comments already. Ctrl-F "dutch" and you'll see a german news story about it

You'd think there would be liability insurance like with cars.

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