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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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?

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

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.

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.

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