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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

There are 20,000 containers on the ship. Assuming you needed to remove 1/4 of those containers to get it to rise far enough to get off of the sand, you need to move 5000 containers.

Assume that it takes 5 minute to connect a bridle to a container, hook it to a helicopter, and move it...and then also assume that the helicopters can run 24/7 and never have to refuel, that they can hot swap in pilots, and that there is never a single problem, you're talking about 25000 minutes, or about 17 days of absolutely non stop running helicopters.

And that only gets you 1/4 of the containers, and it might not even work at all.

(It's not a dumb question, and I'm sure that it was already discussed by the team who is dealing with this. It's just that the scale of what is happening here is restrictive.)

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Just a small correction: 20.000 TEU is not the same as the amount of containers. TEU is the number of twenty foot equivalent. There will be enough 40 foot containers on there. If it was going to Europe there will hardly be any empty containers.

Amount of actual containers is probably the 20.000 divided by 1.6 or so, though it's not a given that any vessel is fully loaded to max capacity. Sometimes need to deal with restrictions.

The weight is more of an issue. Heavy lift helis cannot lift a fully loaded 20ft container (weighing up to 67,000lbs), let alone a 40 footer.

"up to"

Those heavy ones would be evenly distributed in the bottom of the hold, down below the water line. Low-weight ones are on top, for ship stability.

You'd also need a helicopter than can lift containers that heavy, which might be a long shot.

We really are bad at dealing with large numbers. 20 000 does not seem that much when it’s just written that way. Even looking at the pictures, this is a lot of containers, but the efforts needed to get them out of that ship are hard to imagine.

Just going off "count the candy in the jar" math from this image: https://static.vesselfinder.net/ship-photo/9811000-353136000...?

It appears to be roughly 7 x 20 x 25 containers, or 3500... (height x width x length.)

EDIT: Freezing this video I got a better view of how it's stacked today. I'm sure this is imperfect, like I said trying to count candy in a jar. But I'm curious what the real number of containers is!

H X W X L

10 X 23 X 25 ~= 5750

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-suezcanal-ship/beac...

Your height number is off by a factor of 2; a significant factor of container storage on these large container ships is below the deck. It isn't uncommon for these large ships to have 9 to 12 containers stacked on top of eachother before the stack reaches above the deck and becomes visible from the side.

The ship is 400 meters long, you can take off multiple containers in parallel along the ship. I'd guess 4 at once.

Multithreading!

Don't forget that you need to put containers back. Same or more effort needed.

They don't have to put them back.

How many copters are you assuming?

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