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Comment by BurnerBotje | Hacker News Reader

> Later on Monday morning, a second heavy tugboat arrives to pull the ship off completely. In addition, water will be sprayed under the ship with great force to wash away sand and clay. If it is not possible to clear the front of the ship in this way, containers may have to be unloaded from the front of the ship.

(Dutch source: https://www.trouw.nl/buitenland/vastgelopen-containerschip-s...)

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I fail to understand why they didn't/don't use the tugboats to wash the water away. Even small boats can cause a lot of scour with their bow thrusters along a vertical quay wall (which the Ever Given is in a way). The erosive power of a 16MW engine is really something to not be underestimated.

I imagine it’s a mix of

1. They can’t manoeuvre tugs into the right location due to the aforementioned silt and dirt the Ever Given is stuck on/dug up.

2. Tug bow trusters are difficult to aim. Plus how do you hold them steady? They can only fire in one direction at a time, so you have no ability to create a reaction thrust to prevent the tug from moving.

3. Tug thrusters don’t enjoy ingesting huge amounts silt and earth when they’re operating. Which invariably will happen if they’re close enough to banks to have a useful erosive effect.

There’s been like 2 dudes out there with an excavator for a week. Absolutely nothing about this has made any sense. Based on the amount of revenue lost due to this blockage you’d think every military on the earth would have descended there.

That's just that first image. Meanwhile they've been going at it day and night with 6 long boom excavators at the same time.

At this point, I wonder if it economically would cost less to just destroy the vessel

And spread debris throughout the canal, causing more delays as they try to clean that up?

I fail to understand why so many people are proposing this alternative as if blowing up tonnes of cargo in the water, surroundings and air would be fine from an environmental point of view.

The Hollywood effect.

All crises, worldwide, are eventually solved by the American military blowing shit up.

Also: No laws governing other countries.

Or even just filling the canal with debris.

Kurzgesagt tweeted about this (specifically using a nuke to remove the vessel). It's surprising just how big a nuke you would need to remove such a large vessel.

https://twitter.com/Kurz_Gesagt/status/1375607865721958403?s...

Because that worked so well for Florence, Oregon's exploding whale...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34

It's not just 2 dude:

https://youtu.be/xLh1676KRaE?t=20

another interesting view:

https://images0.persgroep.net/rcs/GXjmBPgKzxDcYYksztfQHjNhNl...

>I fail to understand why they didn't/don't use the tugboats to wash the water away. Even small boats can cause a lot of scour with their bow thrusters

If the following video explanation is accurate, a tugboat's turbulence can't scour down to ~50 ft depth of sand: https://youtu.be/zBvFuq7Mkzs?t=1m00s

I think the confusion we have with all these news reports is that we really don't have a definitive visualization or geometry of how its actually stuck in the sand that's accurate/authoritative. A bunch of overhead drone shots don't really reveal to us the true extent of the problem that's hidden underneath the waterline.

We just see words about tugboats arriving and water spraying so our instinct is to simplify the problem to "I don't understand why they can't just do <X>?!?"

EDIT to add informative deep link of how the ship got stuck mentioned by another thread: https://youtu.be/5iyn2q6s1Sk?t=4m28s

Here is an attempt to draw a cross-section of the situation: https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2021/03/26/suez-canal-s...

Great link. That was the diagram I had been wanting to see.

Tearing down Chesterton’s Fence:

"Don’t demand that people stop doing a thing until you fully understand why they think it was worth doing.

Only when you fully understand their perspective should you then argue with their specific reasoning."

Closing Chesterton’s Gate:

“Don’t ask rhetorically why people don’t simply do a thing, until you fully understand why they considered but rejected that thing.

Only when you fully understand their perspective should you then argue with their specific reasoning."

> Don’t ask rhetorically why people don’t simply do a thing [emphasis mine]

Though asking with curiosity, humility and joy, can convert an "argument from failure of imagination" into a "It seems my understanding of the world isn't matching the world! Yay! Learning opportunity! Help me leverage this, let it not slip by unexploited, please?". Those can be wonderfully Aha! fruitful. First step of a bugfix is finding a failure case.

"Was it X that meant you couldn't do Y?" is the best way to phrase it if possible. It demonstrates an attempt, even if it's just a simple one, to understand it, and implies you have faith the other party haven't missed something obvious. Thinking of an X often answers the question for you, stops you looking stupid.

Every now and then, the reply is "that would have been a good idea actually" in which case you still get to look smart. So it's a win+win really.

They could use jets to build Palm Islands, but not to dislodge this ship?

...in a few days?

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