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Comment by grenoire | Hacker News Reader

Weeks are measured in what I'd call, a lot of money. Is it a consolidation of funds sort of issue? Anybody responsible for getting it fixed?

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They hired a company specialized in this kind of stuff (Boskalis), but as their CEO mentioned of TV it depends on how stuck it is. If you're lucky, pumping out the fuel and ballast can make the ship light enough to drag it clear with tugboats. If that doesn't work, you might have to unload some, most or all of the 20k containers from the ship to make it light enough. It can be done, but depending on how much is required it'll take a few days to a week to get the required equipment all the way to Egypt.

If I estimated right, the fuel is a few percent of the total mass (maybe around 5%). Not the most encouraging result.

If it was floating, raising it out of the water by 5% would not be insignificant, and help relieve some of the forces holding it in place.

I wonder what's the margin for raising the center of gravity too much out of the water without risking it tipping, with all that cargo on top.

The people who should be desperately trying to pay a lot of money to get the ship unstuck are maritime insurance underwriters. There is a lot of insurance against late delivery. Unless they have managed to figure out how this is an act of god, that is.

That’s what they’re claiming - it was unexpectedly heavy winds in a sandstorm that caused it to ground.

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.

Seems it's not always so cut-and-dry.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26564849

Egypt is bleeding money right now. It earned roughly USD 15,360,000.00/day from Suez passage fees in 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Authority#Revenues

Wow, costs $300K to transit through the canal per ship by fee alone? That is capital intensive.

It's amazing that more ships are not simply sailing around Africa.

Their daily operating costs are a significant fraction of the $300,000 and it saves a couple weeks.

(tens of thousands of dollars just for fuel each day)

I'd imagine it is riskier sailing all the way around Africa than through the Suez, right?

It's risky for small boats due to the huge waves down there. Huge cargo ships seem to manage ok.

Not really. Think of costs of fuel, costs of crew, I created insurance, slower delivery times.

Given that so many ships that are run by people who can afford $300k per trip, which could pay the annual salary for a team of analysts, it's amazing you're making this comment.

The $300K cost is actually calculated to be just below the amount it would cost extra to sail around the cape, adjusting for other factors, of course.

There's actually a robust and competitive market for intercontinental shipping canals:

https://www.industryweek.com/ideaxchange/article/21965825/su...

The ship can hold 20,000 containers so the fee is only $15 each. By comparison, it costs $16 to take the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan.

They do sometimes depending on oil prices and how much of a hurry they are in https://www.imarest.org/themarineprofessional/on-the-radar/i...

I think this is the hidden story here. Egypt doesn't have a particularly strong economy, its stock market (unlike the US) is 40% below 2018, it's currency fell more than 50% vs USD in 2016 and has only recovered a few percent, and it (like the US) appears to have significantly more debt than ever before. And the entire globe is still somewhat covid-depressed economically.

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

That's more than 5% of the total government revenue. It can definitively lead to instability in the currency because the government might be forced to print the deficit if it cannot secure funding through other means. The inflation rate is well above 2% which means that the government should cut spending and only put money into investments that net a return (cleaning up the canal nets a return).

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