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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

I've been reading costs estimates related to the situation and pretty much all of them are in Billions of USD.

If that's the case, can't they just bomb the ship and be over with it? Maybe don't even bother to unload the cargo, take the fuel and oil out, take the potentially hazardous materials out, take the high value and easily movable items out, destroy the blockage and start a clean up effort with priority of just opening the passage.

Too blunt? Well, that's how we deal with blockages all the time. Probably it is is within the realm of the military tech and operational capabilities, just a matter of cost and time making sense.

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I've seen the "Let's just blow it up" take a few times now, and it doesn't seem feasible for obvious reasons.

If you drop massive ordnance on that thing, it's going to spread debris everywhere. The canal is very shallow and narrow compared to the size of ships that traverse it. This pretty much guarantees a field of debris that will damage other ships if it isn't cleaned up. Cleaning it up will take far longer, and during that time the canal will not be usable.

If you try a targeted approach, with relatively small explosives to break the ship into pieces, then you'll have huge sunken pieces that you have to move, which will be much harder than just spending the time and effort to dig out and tug away the intact ship.

This is all way outside my area of expertise, so maybe I'm wrong. Still, I'll be surprised if blowing it up turns out to be the chosen solution.

Maybe it's because I just want to see it blown up on 4K video from multiple angles but maybe there's a feasible way to break up the ship in a way that will work.

Maybe use shaped charges to detonate the containers to remove weight so that the ship can float? The containers themselves are not that large, maybe container debris in the bottom of the canal is not a big deal?

Of course I'm not an expert too, but it's entertaining to consider the more edgy solutions.

Someone else suggested to pump air into the sand/soil to cause a liquefaction that can help to unstuck the ship.

I'm sure actual expert are working on the subject, so no harm done in entertaining more extreme solutions.

This a a loss distributed over many businesses.

I know, that's where the financial institutions can step in and secure some kind of fund that secures the funds for the operation through collecting it from the parties that would suffer harder if situation not resolved. Insurance companies related to the situation and all the other parties that simply lose out money by not being able to use the passage seem like good candidates to participate in the endeavour.

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