Edit: Something like this https://www.hydrologicalsolutions.com/aqua-barrier-cofferdam...
But you would have to take great care to prevent it from rolling over, so you probably can't lift it up too far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Concordia_disaster#Salva...
[1] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/best-shot-at-unblocking-suez...
The ship weighs 220,000 so it will be riding about 4.5% higher in the water. The main channel is very narrow. Its bow is buried about 20m deep and 100m into the shallow bottom outside of the channel. They are not going to lift it out.
I am excited to see how they will solve the problem though!
The canal itself is MASSIVE - 79ft deep and 700ft wide - and if you're turning you'd need to be wider still. We're talking about removing absolutely massive amounts of material.
Besides, my newspaper said that the economic losses of the stuckness amount to like 400M per hour. That is a looot of money you can throw at a problem.
I don't think we want to be waiting for 10 years. Cheaper to blow up the ship and its cargo than to re-build a whole new canal.
>Proposed uses for nuclear explosives under Project Plowshare included widening the Panama Canal, constructing a new sea-level waterway through Nicaragua nicknamed the Pan-Atomic Canal, cutting paths through mountainous areas for highways, and connecting inland river systems.
Project Orion did contemplate a 400m diameter ship weighing 8 million tons....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
But do the ships actually have to turn? As long as they are floating instead of stuck in the sand, can't they be dragged sideways, either by tugboats or by stationary winches on land?
Of course, the ships would have to stop first, which would take miles of slowing down, and it would probably still be faster to fully dig the stuck ship out of the sand than to dig a diversion channel.
That's when under speed. If these ships don't have the unidirectional port engines like cruise ships do for maneuvering in tight spots (and they may not, I don't know), in this situation they would likely use tugboats for turning. That's what they're for.
That doesn't necessarily make a diversion feasible, but I don't think whether it's feasible or not rests on whether these ships can turn. That's really not the problem as I see it.
Excavate sand around + weight from ship pancakes sand its sitting on, gradually = ship lowers back to floating depth
Also, I doubt the sand goes down very deep...this is a costal area, not rolling dunes. You're going to hit rock quickly.
which is not going to do much here. It seems the trouble with a lot of solutions - the tugs can probably tug with a force of something like 600 tons combined but the ship weights 220,000 tons which is like putting a force of 5kg on a 2 ton car which is stuck. Probably not going to budge it.
Really you want something which will shove it with a force maybe 10% of the weight, say 20,000 tons but there don't seem to be many of those lying around.
I wondered if they tied a cable from the ship to one of the other large ships nearby and fired up the main engines if that could do something?
You're basically asking why can't they just make a whole new canal in less than a week?
I honestly think a lot of thinking works that way, where we'll let tomorrow me worry about it. To be fair, a lot of the time it makes sense. The problems a solution creates are things we need to accept when alternative is worse (think global warming vs starvation circa 1770).
This is the kind of job you want to get right the first time.
Here's a drone video I took today!
I didn't realize they were water-filled!
Digging out around the ship is going to be much less work because of the amount of material you'll need to move and how far you'll need to move it.
So much cash burned per hour, a fallback wouldn't hurt, and secondary backhoes could be used, so the primaries don't slow down in their primary task, dredging.
Of course, I bet someone is, even now, trying to reduce costs, not caring that even an hour or two will wipe out all savings.
An atom bomb would certainly clear the canal, but what of the cost?