Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated | Hacker News Reader

Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

reuters.com

1,068 pointsWJW569 comments

A great Twitter thread with many articles/resources if you want a critical lens at the global logistics supply chain.

https://twitter.com/CharmaineSChua/status/137586855212986368...

I found this article on the impact on super-sized ships on logistical infrastructure useful and fascinating. It describes how the creation of ships too big to fit in the Panama canal (post-PANAMAX ships) was received by 1) Panamanians 2) East Coast / Gulf Coast ports 3) West Coast ports. The Panamanians spent billions expanding their channel to bring port fees and promote attendant value-add services. Ports across the East and Gulf coasts overinvested in trying to make their port the preferred one for these new ships. Clearly, not every port can recoup investments in higher cranes and deeper harbors. There was an irrational optimism on the East Coast, as they sought to take business away from West Coast transhippers (dock in Southern California and ship to the east by train.) In response, the West Coast logistics industry sought and received a series of infrastructure improvements to make transshipment from their ports viable. So, just a few shipping companies are able to increase the size of their ships (for economies of scale) and end up having a major impact on billions of investment dollars in more than a dozen cities. Policy makers in the US aren't able to pick just a few cities to focus investment in. How can you tell a city that they aren't going to get those jobs? Perhaps the US should set a maximum ship size to prevent this wastage of resources; but one could argue the efficiencies for consumers could be worth it.

https://www.ijurr.org/article/fungible-space-competition-and...

The size of these ships keeps increasing at an astonishing rate. See the chart in this excellent talk: https://youtu.be/gdkvAXcZD7U?t=892

Moreover, the hydrodynamic effects of these large ships in relatively shallow and narrow canals is underappreciated. We're liable to see more such incidents as ships get bigger and bigger.

https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d...

You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.

>the hydrodynamic effects of these large ships in relatively shallow and narrow canals is underappreciated

I'm really surprised I haven't seen this mentioned. A long time ago, I was trained as a merchant ship's navigation officer. One of the things we were taught (but unfortunately had few opportunities to practice), was using "bank cushion" or "bank suction" to use the hydraulic interaction between the hull and a narrow body of water like a river to navigate tight curves. These days, there are simulations that I'm sure capture these effects to it's easier to get some experience with them.

Of course, in the case of the Ever Given it seems that the grounding was mainly due to not compensating for the strong cross winds.

That and going ridiculously fast during a sandstorm.

Juan Brown/Blancolirio channel has a good overview and he touches on hydronic interactions you reference too: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5iyn2q6s1Sk

I learned about the bank effect from this article

https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d...

> ... not compensating for the strong cross winds.

Not compensating or not being able to compensate? One implies negligence, the other unavoidable.

> Unavoidable

Not really, weather forecasts are readily available and windage calculations are a thing.

I believe the ft article says that they had 30 kts wind, and steered 'into the wind' to compensate. And since they were in a narrow canal, a sudden lull in the wind was enough.

That doesn't contradict the 'going too fast' though. Just like we don't drive 55 mph in a residential neighborhood, thinking 'if a kid runs into the street that is not my fault, it was unforeseeable'.

With a ship of this size couldn't they have the same problem if they go too slow?

Yes. The ship needs to have a certain amount of water going over the rudder to effect steering.

Oh gosh why didn't the expert sailors whom all have many years of experience think about this trivial matter?

Or could it be that navigating a 400mx60m, 220,000 tonne, 60m tall ship through a canal that is barely double the width with only 4m clearance is just a tad more difficult than that?

Well quite, that's why they might have waited for more favourable conditions instead of trying to take such a big ship through in force 7 'near gale' with poor visibility due to a sandstorm. Seems like a risky thing to do, no? Here's the risk assessment: Can you see where you are going? No. Is it harder to go in a straight line than normal? Yes. Is there anything nearby to hit? Yes.

But the crew of the ship never do close quarters manoeuvring anyway it is the job of the local pilot to get the ship to near to the dock and tug crews who berth it. Maybe in the future the canal will change their risk assessment to hold ships this large when the weather conditions are unfavourable. Or maybe this is at the pilot's discretion already, but there was a 'human factors' issue as there is a post elsewhere suggesting that there might have been some friction with the pilot who was meant to be giving helm orders but was refusing to do so? Who knows?

I don't know if you read this account that was posted here last week [0], but you'll note that there is quite a lot of "pilot's discretion" going on, mostly their discretion to say "that's enough cartons of cigarettes". They do mention wind conditions delaying them, but it's not clear what the threshold might be (or whether a sandstorm might kick up suddenly).

[0] http://www.sailsafely.com/suez_canal.htm

As long as we're idly speculating...

Vessel has a schedule. Has to arrive at a certain berth at a certain time and is expected to only stay there for a certain maximum number of hours because another vessel will be arriving to take its place. Especially if they're already running late, there will be a lot of pressure to keep that schedule and that can lead to doing things that are usually safe, right up until they aren't.

The history of transportation, hell, the history of Mankind, is full of examples.

There is one thing I cannot find an answer for: Why did it draw a penis?

Boredom. Because of covid-19 and the fact that no particular nation is required by maritime law to take on shoreleave-seekers, crews have been at sea for between 2 to 3 times a standard rotation. You find your own way to make your fun.

It is pretty funny though. I have to imagine the captain realizing his track had been discovered is every developer who ever put a comment like /* this is stupid but I'm doing it because my boss is also stupid */ somewhere in a million lines of code, thinking it would never come up in an audit.

The Suez canal has also increased in size over time, it's cross sectional area has steadily increased.

Maybe it's easier to read that Twitter thread here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1375868552129863681.html

Fantastic thread! Thank you for sharing. This has dramatically expanded my "to read" list

> Policy makers in the US aren't able to pick just a few cities to focus investment in.

Policy makers in the US aren't even able to repeal Jones Act, with its disastrous consequences for US shipping industry. You can't expect much from them.

What is the Jones Act and what are its consequences, disastrous and otherwise?

The Jones Act[0] requires that goods transported by water between US ports to fly under the US flag, use ships constructed in the US, owned by US companies, and be crewed by US citizens. This results in a substantial cost increase for water traffic. It's otherwise quite cheap to transport goods by water but because of the act highways and trucks are used instead. An OEDC study[1] found that repealing the act would benefit the economy from $19-64 billion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920

[1] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/local-c...

You got a good response from someone else below, but here is an example of insanities Jones Act leads to. There have been companies running LNG vessels, sailing from Russia to Northeastern US, selling Russian natural gas there, and then sailing south to buy American natural gas in southern states for much lower price, and than sailing back east to sell it in Europe or further east. Northeastern states buy expensive Russian gas instead of cheap American gas, because there is no vessel that could ship gas from south to north: because of Jones Act, it would have to be American built American operated vessel, and such vessel quite simply does not exist.

Lots of articles quote a $XXX billion dollars per day figure, but those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me.

Are there any estimates as to the actual cost of this "mishap", due to e.g. spoilage, financial/contractual repercussions of late deliveries, personnel/fuel costs?

Agreed that just quoting the delayed value does not tell the whole story.

But it could be a pretty good proxy: to some approximation, everything in the supply chain would be set up to work with the 9.6 Bn daily flow of value - everybody's financing payments, payroll, working capital, etc. The time is gone. Just like if you had to take two weeks off (unpaid) because you were sick, you could work more later to get that money back, and recover some of it if you work overtime, but you still missed that window to make money.

Probably the actual cost will require an army of accountants and lawyers at a dozen major logistics corporations arguing with each other for months to even try to compute. I doubt us regular uninvolved people will ever get a "real" number.

How do you even try to calculate and reveal the cost associated with say a manufacturer in the middle of a supply chain deciding to source their parts from a different vendor for this run because their usual source was delayed due to the Suez blockage and they didn't want to leave their factory idle?

Perhaps adding up all the penalties all the delayed ships have to pay could cover it.

Agree it's incalculable, I don't mean that in the "it's too big of a number" sort of way but in the "we can't possibly know" kind of way:

1) The scale and depth of the disruption makes it impractical to figure in any kind of accurate way and

2) The disruption will have introduced hypotheticals that nay spiral out themselves (butterfly effect style) e.g. some retailer may have lost a customer who went elsewhere, some supplier may have lost a retailer who went elsewhere, etc

You can get a rough idea by thinking of this as if it were a natural disaster, and from that perspective I think the toll is probably not too bad. No casualties, very little property damage, and a week is not really all that long.

However... that is no excuse to shrug this off. We were very, very lucky that it was only a week. The ship could easily have broken in two, which would have been a catastrophe of the first order and likely shut the canal down for a year. The world dodged a major bullet here.

That's no joke. Salvage operations is such a fascinating topic, which I'm sure many (me included) found themselves quickly obsessed with. The sagging and hogging threshold of this ship is the critical key here. I'm curious how close/or not the hull came to being compromised.

That's why Smit has naval architects on staff, and the program Hecsalv.[1] They will have calculated the limits of how much the stern could be pushed without damaging the bow before pushing it.

[1] https://www.herbert-abs.com/hecsalv

The canal revenues were down about $15m/day. If it really cost $7b a day, then Egypt is massively undercharging.

Not necessarily. I pay only $1 a day for water, but if you stop giving me water for 7 days the damages are going to be a lot more than $7. That doesn't mean it's reasonable to charge me more than $1 per day for water.

Obviously an extreme example, but the situation with this ship is likely similar. The damages probably far exceed the $15m/day in revenue (though I suspect they are far lower than $7b per day).

> That doesn't mean it's reasonable to charge me more than $1 per day for water.

This is where someone steps in and says something to the tune of "Whatever price you're willing to pay is by definition reasonable" and completely ignore the ethical/moral issues with essentially holding someone's life for ransom by charging the maximum price they can get for something they need to survive.

Looks like you stepped in to say it!

The reason water is cheap is because it's plentiful; there's a lot of competition to supply it. But there's only one Suez canal and sailing around Africa is much worse. So you would expect Egypt to be extracting a significant portion of the value the Suez canal adds.

So… if somebody gets a monopoly on the water supply to an area, you think a price hike is reasonable?

Oh, wait, water's already a monopoly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

The houses just 100 yards away from me have wells for water. There is a large upfront cost of making the well but after that you have "free" water other than the electricity for the pump.

In some countries (Latvia being the example I'm familiar with), water from artesian wells is considered a limited resource and it's taxed.

The subject was predicting the cost of the boat getting stuck by comparing to the known cost to Egypt. The moral aspects of the water situation don't transfer across the analogy unless you also think that Egypt are charging less than they could because they think they have a moral obligation to shipping companies.

1. We're not talking about what's reasonable, but what's expected.

2. This isn't like a monopoly on water supply, because the ships don't have to go this way. To make the analogy work you'd have to add something like "everybody already has a well, but supplying tap water is cheaper than using a well". In such a situation, a water company that's maximizing profits would charge just a little bit less than using a well, and while it would annoy people it wouldn't harm them.

3. The government stops water companies from gouging for the good of the citizens, which isn't a factor here.

Everybody has access to rainwater, except the people who don't. I think the analogy works quite well re point 2 (though not point 3).

We could argue about how fitting it is, but I'll just say this:

If we want to go with "everyone has suitable access to rainwater for important household use", then it changes the impact of the water company overcharging. It goes from despicable to mundane.

In the US there are extensive laws about capturing rainwater, whether you can use rain barrels, etc. although it's no longer prohibited in any state.

https://rurallivingtoday.com/homesteading-today/is-it-illega...

There is no major city with two independant water supplies, with their own sets of pips, purification systems and suers. Thays what water supply means. So no, there is no competition, and a supermarket water bottle is not competition.

You're forgetting about the stick, namely, the literally armies backing these massive shipping companies.

If you're going to run an extortion racket, you need the power to secure yourself against the inevitable challenges to your station. Egypt is in no position to handle and armed threat from the US, China, or even most European nations. Their government would be toppled and a sympathetic one would be installed who would lower shipping prices to something on the cheap side of fair.

Egypt is in no position to handle and armed threat from the US, China, or even most European nations

A little history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis

The Suez Crisis's failure by the British and French had nothing to do with Egypt beating them militarily, and had everything to do with American pressure. One of the West's biggest strategic failures.

The Israel, British, and French insurrection completely dominated the Egyptians. The US wanted to carry favors with Egypt to prevent them to falling into the communist sphere, so it applied a pressure campaign against the British and French that completely wrecked the European economies (and from which they never really recovered). It didn't work, Egypt did not become an American ally in any meaningful way, and instead the West lost control over one of the most important shipping lanes in the world, turning it into a corrupt mess where you have to pay for passage in cigarette boxes and bribes.

It was one of the biggest foreign policy fuck-ups of the USA, in my opinion.

Yes, but you said it yourself, the value the Suez canal adds, compared to going the long way. It's much smaller than the value of being able to ship from A to B at all.

Ha! I never thought I'd see a patio-style charge more to a govt. Only on hn...

Depends.. their fees are likely based on the saved time/cost of circling Africa, and calculated so as not to encourage other nations to construct workarounds themselves (if that’s even geographically feasible).. not on the cost of their service being down once people are already committed to it.

Pretty sure there are literal treaties in place. It’s not simple supply and demand.

Someone else in one of these canal threads said that Egypt charges slightly less than it would cost to sail around Africa. If that's true, that Egypt is probably capturing around as much value as is possible from the canal.

Quite a bit less.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iwOZOb90fM

That example was pretty idealized, starting and ending very close to the canal. Most voyages are probably not affected quite as starkly by the canal, and I doubt the canal can or does charge ships based on their overall itinerary.

> I doubt the canal can or does charge ships based on their overall itinerary

You'd be wrong there! They actually have a rebate system[0] based on a number of factors including origin and destination. Basically, they try to make it so that its always cheaper to go through the canal, rather than sail around.

[0] https://www.wilhelmsen.com/ships-agency/suez-canal/suez-cana...

The suez is the site of massive imperial intervention. The Suez crisis was precipitated when Egypt nationalized the canal. Western militaries and economic leverage are deployed to keep the prices low for the benefit of those governments.

It's a huge mistake to regard any international trade in the middle east as regulated by simple supply and demand curves. This is a site of world geostrategic focus, usually at the expense of the people that live there.

It's not 100% negative - clever Egyptian governments have managed to charge an extra "price" in diplomatic and geopolitical advantage. e.g. using selective closures as a weapon, selective opening to military traffic as an incentive. You just have to be careful not to take actions that affects everyone, like a massive and "unreasonable" price hike; these invite the kind of great-power consensus against you that is very dangerous.

(Interestingly, both have been practiced towards Israel at different times, as the countries have gone from bitter enemies to cautiously aligned against both Iran and Sunni Islamism of the Brotherhood/Hamas flavor.)

I doubt it. It’s a significant source of revenue for a country with limited revenue sources.

End of the day, the big shippers can price in the two week delay to round Africa, and higher tolls could make a competing railway feasible. As it is China will probably have built a rail corridor in a few decades.

The cost to traverse the canal is likely to be as close as possible to the cost of the alternative routes (eg Cape of Good Hope) that Egypt can make them, while still providing the advantages of saved time and operational cost.

The cost here was for the interruption to the schedules, not the daily cost of operations normally.

After Egypt intentionally blocked the Suez Canal during the Six Day War and an operation was taken to reopen it after the Yom Kippur War it took around 7 months to clear the ships that were scuttled to block it[1]. I would think a cleanup with more modern technology dealing with a ship that wasn't scuttled for the purpose of blockage would take less time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Suez_Canal_Clearance_Oper...

The 1974 operation involved ten ships, the largest of which was 6700 tons. The Ever Given displaces 220,000 tons. It's an entirely different beast.

While our ships have grown greatly, so has our ability to salvage them at the same time.

Worldwide salvage capacity isn't up much. Mammoet Salvage and Titan Salvage exited the business a few years ago. Smit is one of the few salvors with worldwide reach and their own heavy equipment. The business requires huge equipment on standby, and trained people waiting for the next crisis.

Smit is now part of Boskalis, which is a big marine engineering firm. They have dredgers, heavy lift ships, tugs, and barges, which are useful both for marine construction and for salvage. So the fleet can do other things between crises.

That feels like the kind of non-obvious claim that should come with a source (even just a blog post by an analyst that lays out the relevant vocab terms and the general theory).

Its large, but its size is limited by sues canal. Ships could be much larger if they were designed for a different route.

Only Qmax and Chinamax are higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinamax

This has a rather odd diagram, and I'm not sure if it supports your comment or not.

It shows Suezmax as having "unlimited length", while Chinamax is given as 360 meters, which I think is smaller than Ever Given.

Obviously unlimited length can't be literal, if the Suez isn't perfectly straight, right?

On the other hand the Chinamax diagram says "unlimited air draft" which again, can't be literal since at some point it would be impossible to keep upright?

The Chinamax designation seems to imply a greater draft, which does make sense, but it's only 20% greater than the greatest stated for Suezmax.

I am not an expert but what I think they mean by 'unlimited' in this context is 'limited by engineering, not limited by 'geology of man made structure.'

> Obviously unlimited length can't be literal, if the Suez isn't perfectly straight, right?

It looks to me from the map like the tightest turns in the canal are the southern exit near Suez, and the turns between Timsah Lake and El Qantara el Sharqiya (depending on which channel you're in, and whether you're allowed to use both channels in your turning maneuvers).

It would be a fun problem to find a good way to figure this out exactly, but it looks to me like a ship 3000 to 4000 meters long would not be able to complete those turns even in principle without running aground. (Presumably the actual practical limit is a lot lower.)

The longest ship ever built (which exceeded the draft limits for Suezmax, so it was out for a different reason) was 458 meters long

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawise_Giant

... so there might still be an order of magnitude to play with if you were making a ship that was ideally small and maneuverable in other regards.

Chinamax means ships that can use specific harbours, which imposes a length limit. Panamax likewise has a length limit because the ship has to fit inside the locks in the Panama Canal.

The Suez Canal doesn't have locks, so in principle the length isn't limited. In reality it of course is limited by the harbours you intend to use. Apparently ships longer than 400m also require permission from the Suez Canal Authority.

More important for the claim that Chinamax is bigger is the tonnage. Chinamax can carry 400,000 tonnes, while Suezmax is typically under 200,000 tonnes.

There is no major bullet here. Nowadays the alternative route around Africa takes 10 days only.

10 days is not a big deal if it's just one shipment. It's a huge deal if it affects every ship that would otherwise have gone through the canal, i.e. 50 ships a day, 18,000+ ships a year. That's 180,000 extra ship-days per year. That's a pretty major bullet in an economy built on just-in-time inventory control.

Aside from the additional ships, you need additional containers, employees, etc. It also costs more in bunkers, etc. For JIT it wouldn't matter too much though. As long as it arrives on schedule it would be ok.

> some retailer may have lost a customer who went elsewhere, some supplier may have lost a retailer who went elsewhere, etc

But then that also created profits for another supplier!

And the increase in profits of that second supplier might surpass the losses of the first supplier if the customer made their original decision based on cost. You can frame this as increasing economic output. Let's break all the canals[1].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

But the customer will end up paying more! It's a never-ending problem!

(Increasing economic outputs by breaking all canals is the perfect example of why I'm always worried about gradient descent)

> 2) The disruption will have introduced hypotheticals that nay spiral out themselves (butterfly effect style) e.g. some retailer may have lost a customer who went elsewhere, some supplier may have lost a retailer who went elsewhere, etc

And some retailers and suppliers may have gained customers

> The disruption will have introduced hypotheticals

In general, temporary disruption has some long-term positive economic effects (which is directly why 'disruption' is valued in Silicon Valley).

For example, during London Tube Strikes, commuters find different and more efficient routes and 5% ended up permanently changing their route on public transport: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tube-strike...

This reminds me of annealing, and why it's implemented as a technique for finding optima.

I'm not blocking the canal, I'm testing robustness!

Also in the big picture with covid not being as deadly as it could have been, could serve as a nice dress rehearsal for a captain trips.

We theoretically may have avoided, for the next few decades, the risk of a truly dangerous infectious disease being underestimated, something halfway between Covid and extinction-level threat.

Given the sheer quantity of idiots underestimating it right now, I'm not too sure that things will have improved a few decades down the line.

I think it's hopeful humanity would prevail a more deadly pandemic, many countries closed borders very quickly and there are island nations with understandably quick responses. Civilization as we know it could definitely still get wiped out though.

That's a great tshirt slogan "I'm not blocking the canal, I'm testing robustness!"

This happened with the bridge collapse on I-85 in Atlanta [1]

I used to take the access road parallel to the bridge and avoid a lot of traffic that was south bound. When the bridge collapsed and I-85 was blocked off, everyone learned about the parallel access road, and it now became a cluster of a traffic hot zone too.

Prior to that, a lot of people were not aware of the alternate route.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_85_bridge_collapse

I’ve seen this happen to a lot of my favorite shortcuts in the east bay since the introduction of waze.

The discovery of the alternate route by "everyone else" means that the roads are now in more usage.

Unless the bridge collapse resulted in increased traffic levels afterwards, the same traffic that used to go over I85 is now distributed over 2 routes.

While there's a net negative to you, it's likely that a lot of people ended up saving time on their routes.

> it's likely that a lot of people ended up saving time on their routes.

It's theoretically possible this describes a Braess paradox, whereby everybody loses: https://image.slideserve.com/280060/braess-s-paradox-l.jpg

Yup, just think of covid. It has accelerated digitization of the world in an unprecedented way, amongst the many other world changes it has caused.

Think of the EverGiven as global shipping's chaos monkey....

That article doesn't link to the study and leaves out major questions about the methodology:

1. How did they decide that the benefits would continue over the course of 4 years?

2. How did they determine what "time lost" was? I imagine it's greater than just extra time waiting at the station. People probably also got lost trying to find a new way around, and were late to things important to them. Unexpectedly being late to a job interview is a very different kind of time lost than saving 3 minutes on your regular daily commute.

That is why most of the people are fine with $XXX million per day as it is not practical to narrow it down to thousands of dollars.

We lost $100 millions, so it does not matter if it was $10k or $20k more or less because that is less than 1% of the total. There is no meaningful decision you can make based on that 1% difference.

Probably the actual "damage" that was caused will be given by the insurance companies as a sum of claims covered, but there will be a lot of companies that simply have to eat the loss incurred by idling factories and the likes because their supply contracts allow for delivery delays or because pursuing coverage isn't worth the effort (e.g. for those who still had sufficient stock to cover a week of delay and no "real" damage occurred).

A many weeks long shutdown (in case they had to unload the Ever Given) would be many orders of magnitude more expensive.

> but there will be a lot of companies that simply have to eat the loss incurred by idling factories and the likes

Factories will know enough in advance of this problem. They can fly over some supplies to keep the factory running. It's entirely normal to do this. They usually do _not_ idle or shutdown the factory. Who pays is for lawyers and so on.

A shipping company will know about these clients and prioritize that cargo.

This makes me question that shouldn't we have another canal built? Like if so much of the world's economy depends on this route shouldn't we build an extra canal to speed up the transportation and also act as a redundancy

Where do you propose building this extra canal?

Cue Elon Musk promising to build a tunnel version of it for $5 million total cost, opening fall 2022.

Of course everything has to be repacked into little tubes and back into containers on the other end, but let's not let these things get in the way of a solid plan. Elon Musk!

It's a lot further to dig, but the next best thing would be to dig from the Persian gulf through Iraq, Syria and probably Lebanon. Not forgetting half the Persian Gulf is Iran. It's not exactly the most stable geopolitical area.

I'm not sure there's a path that's flat enough to make it practical even if everything else falls into place somehow.

A quick look suggests that the Tigris is mostly navigable up to Baghdad, which would get you halfway there.

As an alternative (and ignoring the obviously substantial geopolitical concerns), is there a geographic reason not to dig a canal on the other side of the Sinai from, say, Aqaba to Rafah? If you had to dig that far, it would seem to be the next best option.

It's kind of hard to tell, but it looks like the Suez canal was on super flat land and I recall most of Sinai is desert. The Israel-Egypt border doesn't look that flat based on the colouring on the leading image of [1].

1. https://www.npr.org/2007/06/04/10619929/six-day-war-shaping-...

I mean, the alternative proposal was a canal through the ~3rd most violent region on the planet.

Absolutely, I imagine the insurance alone would make the Persian Gulf route unviable. Pirates is one thing, but governments confiscating boats would be a huge disincentive. The other side of the Sinai is probably much more palatable even if Egypt and Israel aren't best buddies.

Not to mention the terrorism/sabotage/non-state actor destruction opportunities that route would present that are moderately prevented on the Red Sea side (if you can get past the Horn of Africa).

I can't see Egypt approving an alternate canal that Israel would have any control over, but I could absolutely see Israel going in on a chance to a) take business from Egypt and b) add a defensive feature along that border.

Both a) and b) would require a real increase in tensions. Israel and Egypt have a cold peace, with several common enemies/interests; the prospect of a direct military confrontation is nil, and neither side will go out of their way to harm the other economically.

The terrain along the Negev route is extremely hostile. Bypass proposals have mostly focused on rail lines from Eilat/Aqaba to the large and well-developed Israeli ports on the Mediterranean, but even constructing rail lines there is quite difficult.

An underappreciated fact of Israeli and Palestinian geography is its mountains and hills; any major transportation project [1] requires extensive tunnel and bridge work.

[1] Examples: the TLV/Jerusalem high speed rail, the Haifa highway bypass, or a proposed transportation corridor connecting the main West Bank population centers along the ridge of the Judean and Samarian mountain ranges.

partially done already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal#Bypass_expansion

I think you massively underestimate the cost (land, machinery, labor, upkeep) of undertaking such a project.

We did it with the Panama Canal a century ago. Granted, the Suez Canal is ~190km compared to the Panama Canal at ~80km, but it is possible.

It should be pointed out that the northern part of the canal has a second canal running parallel. The southern portion is the only part that has only a single passage.

Political instability is definitely a contributing factor to the fragility of the southern corridor.

I'm a layman, but it seems like there are probably other preventative measures that are way cheaper.

A Bloomberg article (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-27/how-a-des...) says the speed limit was 7.6 to 8.6 knots but the Ever Given was traveling at 13.5 knots. So maybe they need to start enforcing that limit.

Reportedly this was during high winds, so they could also reduce the speed limit even further in those conditions.

Or they could have Suez specialists be the ones piloting large ships through the canal rather than the ship's normal crew. (As I understand it, that's pretty standard for harbors. Not sure if the Suez already does that.)

Or maybe there's a technology solution, something like stability control for cars, except it's for ships in narrow canals.

As is standard for canal transit, the Evergiven was piloted by a Suez pilot at the time of the accident. Because this ship's main steering force comes from the rudder, it has more force when it goes faster. Maybe they even accelerated to counter the strong winds.

Navigating canals and major harbours requires a pilot.

Pilot was on board, but there seems to have been some kind of conflict between Master and Pilot that resulted in high tension environment on the bridge.

Ever Given Master’s statement is published here, and has been circulating among the crews for a few days: http://www.maritimebulletin.net/2021/03/28/ever-given-latest...

So, some weird drama. If this is true, however, this would be a gross misconduct of behalf of the Pilot.

I don't see how the report in the linked article is related to Ever Given. It certainly isn't of the fateful trip because it's about a southbound journey.

It contains a report of the behavior of the local Pilots that are supposed guide the ship through the canal.

Last line before the report

>Read this Statement and ask yourself – can such incident lead to accident like grounding or collision?

If the professionals are not doing their job and even causing issues on the bridge;

i.e. >As soon as the master picked up the VHF and called Ismalia Port Control on Ch8, the pilot raised his volume high, started shouting, snatched the VHF from the master’s hand (which also resulted in advertently pushing the Master) and threatened that if same was reported “It will not be good for the vessel”.

>At that very moment, in his raised volume he called for fwd and aft stations and for both anchors to be lowered to water level, as he insisted on stopping the vessel and arresting vessel for faulty steering. He said vessel will be held at Bitter lake until sea trials were carried out. Fwd station was immediately manned however anchors were not lowered as ship was doing 9 knots speed.

Then it could lead to accidents.

I find that the difficult conditions at the time are sufficient to explain the accident. Maybe we'll learn that there was unprofessional behaviour by a pilot. But until such time, that is unwarranted speculation.

The linked article is a hodgepodge of random factoids and hearsay. It even confused the poster into thinking the report was from the Ever Given. Doesn't look like a good source to me.

The slower the boat travels, the closer to the wind it has to point in order to avoid being pushed into the leeward shore. (assuming it doesn't have significant thrust-vectoring capabilities at both the bow and the stern which as far as I can tell seems to be the case for large cargo ships)

Because the boat is longer than the canal is wide, for any nonzero perpendicular wind speed there is a minimum boat speed below which it would not be able to avoid running aground. The solution is to either not permit such large ships to transit the canal during high wind events or to send them with enough tugboats to counteract the force of the wind.

From what I heard they’ve suffered a blackout which is an event when your power goes out.

Friends scientific boat had a same thing in Kiel canal, but only 22 meter boat and under and hour.

>it seems like there are probably other preventative measures that are way cheaper.

Like doing nothing, and sailing around Africa in the extremely rare case there's a problem.

Makes me think of: https://xkcd.com/1205/

Israel at some point was considering setting up a rail track between Eilat and the rest of the country. The main benefit of doing so is that cargo ships could unload and Eilat (red sea) and have cargo transported to a port in the mediterranean sea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_railway_to_Eilat

That plan was frozen after the Egypt-Israel peace agreement.

It's been floated after the peace treaty too; it's just unlikely to justify the massive cost, now that the strategic consideration of bypassing an Egyptian blockade is past.

Possibly current decarbonization movement makes a new canal plan better?

So by attempting to calculate it, the cost goes up higher.

For spoilage etc., most of it would be insured, I assume, so insurance claims would likely be a solid proxy for estimating one aspect of impact.

I'm gonna assume the insurance companies will know by the time this is all over.

I'm not sure the collective "we" will ever truly know. I'd imagine a LOT of that livestock died and they aren't going to be jumping up and down to volunteer how many/much given the negative PR. If they did divulge that would probably be the easiest jumping off point for hard losses.

I'd start by computing the number of ships that went around the Southern tip of Africa as a result of the stuck ship. I wonder how much the cost of extra fuel and food/pay for all of those ships doing additional miles will be? And the resulting increase in wholesale/retail costs?

Regarding penalties re late delivery, I'm less worried about that. Cargo ships always have language about loss and force majeure. I think a stuck ship would qualify as force majeure. And a week shouldn't affect most perishables e.g. grain, that go into containers.

Container ships burn horrible, cheap bunker fuel, and the shipping industry is infamous for hiring crew from low-income countries like the Philippines, paying them a pittance, and treating them like modern-day slaves.

I'd strongly suspect that the costs for spoilage and knock-on effects from late delivery etc would outstrip crew and fuel costs by a large margin.

Filipino Masters and Chief Engineers are being paid north of $8500/month. Evidently you are not well informed.

I don't doubt a select few senior people are well paid - but there are many, many more junior crew members that do not fit that description.

Also - rude.

I'm not sure OP was talking about masters and chiefs (chiefes? Why does that look weird spelled both ways?).

I'm certain s/he was talking about juniors on the ships.

I believe that we can simply look at the channel fees lost due to the downtime - as far as I understand, the fee for using the channel is intentionally close to "the cost of extra fuel and food/pay for all of those ships doing additional miles", a bit lower but not much lower than the alternative of going around Africa.

As posted elsewhere in this thread, this guy debunks that theory:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iwOZOb90fM

Grain is usually carried by bulkers, not in containers.

Also, are there any paths for supply chain interruption insurance to kick in?

those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me

Is it just me, but hasn't the mainstream financial news over the years taken on the feel of reality television? The talking heads are usually pushing some sort of narrative. Occasionally, reality overwhelms their ability to spin things, and they have to readjust and do damage control, as sometimes happens to the producers in a reality TV show. The aim of their manipulation and spin seems to be mainly to keep up the level of drama, just as in a reality TV show.

Drama sells better than facts.

I wish it wasn't so, but it is.

Early on it was reported that it could take weeks to reopen the passage, with a cost of billions to the world trade. Now, just one week later it's open again, barely enough time to make the alternate route a good idea.

These rather unrealistic projections seem to have started with the Coronavirus reporting and is an interesting phenomenon in itself.

I don't think they had a previous sprint's velocity to base their estimates on; this was unprecedented.

And honestly, had the ship still been stuck on wed, tide would not be as high for another moon cycle; further complicating.

I am not sure the projections were unrealistic. The full picture simply wasn't known or even knowable. The best likely scenario with the known information was a few hours; the worst likely scenario was weeks.

it was reported that it could take weeks to reopen the passage

That's true - it could have taken weeks and the cost of spoiled or delayed cargo could have reached billions.

After a day of tugs unsuccessfully trying to free the ship, there was no reason to assume it would be a fast recovery.

But the same news that said "it could take weeks" also reported on the ongoing efforts.

Boring, facts and research based industry/financial news exists. But it can cost upwards of a couple hundred thousand dollars per year. If you want real news, you'll have to pay for it.

What are your recommendations for real news? I've heard FT, WSJ, and the economist, and am looking to finally commit and sign up instead of relying on free. You get what you pay for is true in this case, and I don't wanna put drama based narratives in my head, which form my perception of the world.

I meant more industry specific news rather than general news. Organizations that cover niche topics, usually catering towards businesses or investors rather than the general public. In my case it's things like Covenant Review, Xtract Research, Debtwire, Reorg, etc. There are likely similar services catering to shipping and logistics that would provide better analysis on this situation than most general news organizations.

The FT:

- Good if you care about mostly business in the developed world (Europe and US). - Really, really, really good features, solid visualisation, and a fairly wide breath of writers in terms of opinions.

The Economist:

- Very opinionated, but extremely diverse coverage of lots of different parts of the world (I've never come across a better English language source on Africa, for example). - Weekly, so if you only want to read news occasionally, it may work for you

WSJ:

- Pretty good coverage overall, the US business/tech coverage is much better (in depth) than the FT's - Their opinion section is like the NYT in bizarro-world.

In terms of price FT > Economist > WSJ.

It really depends on what you're looking for, but the FT works for me as a daily driver (I ended my subscription to the Economist, and only signed up for the WSJ about a month ago).

Thank you, this is insightful. I fall squarely between FT & Economist, so I may end up subscribing to both, but given Economist is weekly, this might be a better match for my lifestyle.

What kind of news publication costs several hundred K a year to subscribe to?

principle agent problem and always has been ... what’s stunning is that civilization manages to create some amount of value despite this ... imagine what the world would be like if humans learned how to actually cooperate at scale and maximize long term in an antifragile way

In my bedroom as a young teenager I used to think a worldwide event which affected every person equally, like finding life in another planet, would surely usher in a new era of common interest and a shared view that we're all but the same thing: human.

I've since turned more cynical and believe that greed is as essential to humanness as empathy, if not more, and without a strong moral code (and fear of being ostracized for breaking it), selfishness wins.

The pandemic has violently dispelled any remaining expectation I had for a future cosmopolitan society.

I had high hopes for a pro-social silver lining around the pandemic as well, but it's simply too distant and indirect (especially given that the outcomes ranged so widely to those infected: from death, to the worst flu ever, to no symptoms at all).

What gives me hope is the fact that our species has altruism at all, even if it isn't as widespread as we would like; it's evidence that cooperation is at least sometimes a competitive advantage. Looking at nature, we see both symbiosis and predation as successful survival strategies. The tension between Good and Evil we will have with us always; the bad news is that Good will never definitively win, but the good news is that neither will Evil.

Thanks for commenting. That's a helpful and insightful perspective.

> I've since turned more cynical and believe that greed is as essential to humanness as empathy, if not more, and without a strong moral code (and fear of being ostracized for breaking it), selfishness wins.

It's not the baker empathy that brings you bread, but his greed

> The pandemic has violently dispelled any remaining expectation I had for a future cosmopolitan society.

The pandemic makes me hope more people will see governments for what they are: restricting their freedoms for no good reasons, so it's better to starve the beast.

Real economics is boring for most people and the only way to make it attractive to the masses is to be sensationalistic. Mainstream financial news has never been good and never will be.

Real economics includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to considered "real economics".

> Real economics includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to considered "real economics".

You're not wrong, but you could replace "economics" with almost anything and it would still be a valid (and usually meaningful, although context matters) statement.

> Real engineering includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to [be] considered "real engineering"

I mean how else are you going to push back against the clueless PMs who can't be bothered to learn how to code?

> Real art includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to be considered "real art"

Of course, how else do you expect to create value for something unique that is not easily priced by the market?

> Real science includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to be considered "real science"

I'd say this accurately describes academia. Honestly this last one is eerily insightful.

That's just news to be. Random loose correlation of events plotted into a narrative.

Facts are supposed give rise to an emergent narrative. That is good journalism. What we have in 2021, are people curating facts and only including those that fit their pre-determined narrative.

Worse: the narrative is curated to elicit pre-determined emotional reactions.

In other words: Reality TV!

While it would be naive to pretend that pre-determined narratives aren't a huge factor, I think that model leaves something out: that journalists and organizations are often incentivized to distort the facts into arbitrary narratives, based not on values or ideology, but on virality and cognitive/emotional stickiness. "Person X is a hero" and "Person X is a villain" will both tend to outcompete nuance ("Person X is flawed but well-intentioned and has done both good and bad things.").

journalists and organizations are often incentivized to distort the facts into arbitrary narratives

Those aren't arbitrary. They are often pre-decided by higher ups in the company, or pre-decided as the prevailing groupthink in some forum or mailing list. People have been calling this stuff out online for years! Funnily enough, it stays out of the consciousness of normal people, because it's never covered in the mainstream news. Invariably, the people doing the exposing are then labeled something unsavory, so very few people bother to look into it. Some of this stuff is bunk. However, some of it is clearly real, and kinda disgusting.

Stuff like this has even been going on since the 80's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

No dispute: journalistic institutions are power concentrations that invite pressure from all sorts of private interests, in addition to prevailing internal groupthink. (In the Twitterati era, I'd say the latter problem is both top-down and bottom-up, and they compound much more often than they cancel out.)

What I'm saying is that even if one corrects for ideological motives, obsequiousness to power, etc., one is still left with an independent incentive towards maximizing eyeballs, and therefore torturing complex realities into digestible narratives, and that can be a problem in and of itself.

They are amazing at knowing why the DJI moved up/down. Just for yesterday though. I think for tomorrow you have to subscribe.

> Is it just me, but hasn't the mainstream financial news over the years taken on the feel of reality television?

I like to look at the bright side: The world has caught up with Egyptian geography. :)

I don't think there will be any spoilage, the goods travelled through sea are never fresh.

Ever Given is a container ship, containers don't carry live animals. Other ships that were stuck behind it have live animals(cattle mostly) but they are on ships specifically designed for animals.

No. It was blocking ships with live animal cargo.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/26/at-least...

LOL. The fruits in American grocery stores are not airlifted in from Brazil.

There are probably better ways to say this. If you're familiar with the industry, perhaps you could better inform the conversation.

Personally, I've always been surprised by the amount of fruit, flowers, and other perishables that do economically come in via air.

Flowers, yes. Fruits, short of the exotic, name them.

Alphonso mangos. Many other "exotics", which oftentimes just means they need special processing to clear APHIS based on their country of origin.

Landing here in Seattle, I've seen planes unload huge amounts of fruit and produce, probably bound for asian groceries stores.

I've seen high-value WA apples travel by air to India. I was a bit surprised by this one too.

Livestock is often/always transported by ship, and they are more than "fresh", they are still alive.

Whether that trade is humane is a separate question.

There are also containers that are maintained at a fixed temperature/humidity for transporting "fresh" items. They still have a limited transport time.

Still not what you're asking for, but the analysis here looks like it's done by people who understand this sort of thing: https://lloydslist.maritimeintelligence.informa.com/LL113622...

This seems to be the key bit:

> If the canal does reopen quickly, vessels waiting now should be able to make up time without too much disruption to the supply chain, which is already weighed down by port congestion and inland transportation delays.

What does such a number mean without context?

Imagine a toy example: 2 bakers in a street. John and Jill. John has a heart attack and his bakery is closed for the week.

- John gets nothing that week, from his perspective you could say he lost a week of sales

- The people in the street lose Johns cakes that week, but most are ok with going to Jill, as they are close enough. 50% go to jill, and the other 50 decide to save the money.

- Jill gains 50% of johns customers for the week.

How would would you even assess the "global damage" in such an example for 1 street. Let alone the global economy.

The money is there to drive things, pulling it out from one perspective is like looking at one weight in a neural network.

Not only does Jill gain 50% of John's customers for the week, but let's say that 20% of those customers decide that they actually prefer Jill's goods and stay as customers of Jill even after John has re-opened.

Yes, but some of Jill's customers come at lunch and couldn't afford to wait in the longer lines. Those customers now go to John's having waited a few days to look for an alternative. Jill gets 20% of John's clientele, but John gets more [impatient] customers than ever!

There will probably be some additional flow of customers as people realise they're too lazy to walk to Jill's/John's, Jill's was only better when they were doing the extra trade (freshness), or that Jill's is back to being quicker service (and then you have a chaotic effect as more people drift back the wait time gets longer).

The potential complexities of such simple systems are fascinating.

I work on an IoT product, and operations is already talking about potential production delays because of this. There's already a global plastic shortage, and this is only going to make things worse.

The silver lining there is that more companies should be able to absorb a double delivery when three weeks of goods all show up at once.

Most businesses can’t just skip a week and then process twice as much raw goods to catch up.

> There's already a global plastic shortage

Whoa, bad time to be in IoT then, since they're pretty much entirely plastic and a few (also probably short) components!

https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/plastic-scrap-demand-...

https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2021/03/10/10615...

If we count only missed revenues for Egypt, this incident cost them about US$100 million. Canal revenues were US$27.2 billion in the last 5 years (https://www.reuters.com/article/egypt-economy-suezcanal/egyp...) which is US$15 million in revenues per day, and the canal was closed for 7 days.

It’s probably less than that because many transits would have just been delayed, not entirely cancelled.

They run the canal at maximum capacity indefinitely. Due to the lack of downtime, any delays are in effect the same thing as a cancel from the perspective of the canal owners.

According to reports, the backlog of traffic should be cleared in about 10 days. They must have some spare capacity available in order to do that.

Maybe backlog will be cleared as result of some ships taking route around Africa?

The canal was blocked for only 6 days. Then 10 days to clear would suggest the opposite, that there is not spare capacity. All shippers have to eat a permanent delay that will never be caught backup, everyone is 10 days behind forever.

And re-routes around Africa don't count as spare capacity for the canal itself.

Of course there may be some *literal* spare capacity, that could be realized by violating processes. But the canal is in fact run at maximum capacity according to the maximum that official process allows.

> They run the canal at maximum capacity indefinitely

We have to stop doing this with all of our critical systems, it causes hiccups to be so costly.

Low utilization can be even more costly.

But building everything to have a higher capacity also wastes a lot of resources! It is a balancing game.

What is so critical about the Suez Canal. If it were down for a month/year. what do you think the impacts would be? Would most ship traffic simply go around Africa?

Accepting that globalization wasn't such a big thing then, the closure between 1967 and 1975 would be a good source of objective 'what actually happened' data.

We'd have to build a lot more ships and containers and burn a lot more fuel. Consumer prices would be higher, and some products wouldn't be on shelves

Like having nurses and doctors idling around, just in case a pandemic appears out of nowhere?

But isn't "worth of goods delayed" a reasonable figure?

For example, if there is a total of X shipping capacity a year, and no reasonably priced alternatives (or extra capacity available via rail/air/etc), then disrupting $Y worth of goods for D days reduces the total amount of goods that can be traded that year by $Y*D.

Or is there something I'm missing here?

The part you are missing is that shipping capacity/year is not hard capped.

the livestock loss will be interesting to research as it was highlighted there was a significant number of ships carry live cargo.

Odd, the Sun has a great article on this floating job

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14484562/suez-canal-ship-reflo...

There is a term for the cost of just holding something you can't move: the carrying costs. Different commodities have different carrying costs, so you can look at the forward prices for wheat, oil, pork bellies and so on and get a sense for how much it costs to hold on to something for a week or a month etc.

(On rare occasions the curve is inverted)

It won't tell you how much it costs this tanker to delay delivery by a week but it will tell you on average how much "the market" values a week's delay.

It is still a chore to go through and tally all the goods but I think a few main goods (oil, wheat, coffee etc) would account for a large chunk of it and if the carrying costs as a whole would give a sense of the order-of-magnitude of the economic loss.

The loss itself may be distributed between various risk sharing parties like insurance companies and so forth.

Late delivery penalties aren't really an economic loss, it is a wash mostly. Similarly loss of revenue is mostly a wash

The freight costs are in the range of 0.6%-3% of the cost of the goods transported on average. This is for the amortized cost of purchasing the ships, maintenance, the labor and fuel costs. If you estimate the value of the delayed goods at $10b, and the freight costs at an extra 2% that's $200m in damages.

Most food transported this way wouldn't be spoiled by a delay of a week. If 10% of the goods were food by value, and 15% of them were perishable, and they were worth half as much after being delayed delayed a week that is another $75m lost to spoilage. But it isn't always a one week delay, many ships are delayed less to start, and there will be increased congestion in the ports and ground transport for many of these ships.

It's too soon to determine this right now.

According to this paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the average loss of value per day of delay from the cargo on these ships is between 0.6 and 2.2 percent [1]. According to other research I've seen, somewhere between 12% and 30% of daily global sea trade goes through the Suez Canal. Anyone want to do the math?

1) https://www.nber.org/digest/jun12/time-trade-barrier

Well, the Suez canal is optional, and comes at a cost just to use it. When the cost of fuel is low, you might opt for the long route.

But there's definitely discontinuities that emerge when the option is taken away -- oil refineries lose supply, which increases the cost of fuel, which makes the long way more expensive.

The actual cost is $$ million in total, substantially less than a billion.

Source: friend who is a merchant marine officer

I expect commodity prices and spot shipping will jump short term but long term disaster avoided.

A bit more detail here [1] and here [2]. A combination of vacuuming sand, high tide, and tugboats did the trick.

[1]: https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2021/03/29/Su...

[2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/29/ever-given-turned-8...

Is it just me or is the Evergiven listing to port?

Entirely possible. The tugs are hooked up pretty high so that could be part of it.

The other part is that they may have intentionally shifted ballast or fuel to induce a port list to assist the salvage.

There were reports I read earlier that part of the unsticking process was pumping fuel and ballast water around to remove as much weight as possible from the bow of the ship. It's probably unbalanced the ship a bit and they're just waiting to get to the lake to pause and fix it to allow shipping to resume as fast as possible.

I'm only seeing that on two pictures, and in both there's a tugboat attached to the top front of the ship pulling it sideways.

Oh hey, they fixed it,

- without destroying or imposing significant additional damage to any of the cargo

- without destroying or imposing significant additional damage to the ship

- without taking multiple weeks

- without needing to ship a trillion dollars'+ worth of equipment halfway around the world

It's refreshing to see high-end engineering performed so competently.

About the cargo part - it's entirely possible that some cargo is non-viable. It is going to be onboard days longer than predicted. Anything even faintly perishable may be degraded.

But good news for sure!

It's already a trip halfway around the world at something like 30 km/h. If you're transporting goods that are that sensitive, you're likely doing it by air already. Ships get delayed all the time for various reasons.

The ship will still likely be anchored for hull inspection, perhaps in Bitter Lake. That may take a couple of days at best, and an indefinite stranding if serious problems are discovered.

Also crew change is likely because of on-going investigations, and that will be tricky with the on-going mariner crunch. There's not a lot who are qualified to run a ULCV, especially one straight out of an accident.

In the past ships already got stuck on the Bitter Lake - for quite some time!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Fleet

I think those were unloaded during the ‘delay’. If they weren’t, I guess the Wikipedia page would have mentioned something about life on the Münsterland, carrying eggs and fruit.

I would assume any perishable cargo was quickly lost to spoilage during the ongoing conflict and the rest of the cargo just staying there. There are actually interesting stories about how the crews of the stack ships got to know each other and how they spent their time during the uncertain time after the channel became impassable - they did theater plays, did sports competitions, fished for food, etc.

Over time as the political situation cleared up a bit most of the crew members were repatriated with just a periodically rotated skeleton crew watching over the ships staying behind.

> It's already a trip halfway around the world at something like 30 km/h

This sounds slow at first, but, since you can drive pretty much 24/7, that's still 720km per day. If you're literally going halfway around the world (20.000km), you'll be there in 28 days. Since you drive on water, you'll do few small detours (I assume), so you can actually get those 700km a day.

EU<->China even appears to be "only" 7000 km [0], so if you could drive in a straight line you could get there in 10 days. 14 with usual delays and detours, maybe. That's a reasonable time span for a lot of perishable goods. With the blockage doubling that time, I can easily see how this would affect quite a few goods.

[0] https://www.distancefromto.net/distance-from/Europe/to/China

Container ships can easily have an unpredicted wait of 1-2 weeks just entering port, happens all the time and isn't major news. Few days in the Suez canal isn't going to do anything to cargo.

While the Ever Given may not have an issue, the HAJH AMINA which is waiting in the Great Bitter Lake is a livestock carrier that should have been unloading in port yesterday.

Sure but the same principles apply - delays happen, and livestock ships are equipped to keep livestock alive with food and water well stocked in case they can't enter port for days(which again, happens all the time, sometimes papers aren't exactly right and the livestock has to wait on the ship until cleared for offloading)

I've seen this ship mentioned a couple of times. I kind of assume the subtext is that we should stop sending live animals by ship (except for perhaps specialist and breading stock), which I totally agree with, as much for the dangers of spreading disease as for an ethical concern for the animals involved.

The shipping of livestock is controversial here in NZ and some (likely high) estimates suggest a death rate of as much as 1 in 10. The issues are pretty closely tied to conditions at the other end of shipping (feedlots, slaughterhouses etc) as well as the shipping though.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018765098...

There appears to be little "high-end engineering." Just a high tide and a bunch of tug boats.

A high tide and some tug boats becomes 'high-end engineering' if it works

I'd guess figuring out where you can safely attach the tug boats, monitoring stability and stresses on the container ship and so on is non-trivial, too.

If you fuck up bad enough those containers end up landing on the tugs, killing the crews. Not to mention increasing the quantity of stuff blocking the canal.

Have you looked at tug boat propulsion units lately? Those things look like black magic.

You are right, these things are nuts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voith_Schneider_Propeller

Wow this is the coolest thing I've learned this week.

High end engineering uses the simplest and most cost effective solution to get the job done right.

It would have been a mistake to throw expensive, complicated solutions at a problem that had a relatively simple solution.

simple is better than complex!

So just "engineering" then

You forgot dredging tons of material. And dredgers have some of the more complex naval engineering out there with all its moving parts.

Pretty sure I've seen a definition of engineering that was "Solve the problem by doing as little new as possible".

Sometimes the safest way to deal with the so-called legacy systems we all know and love

Or "by doing as little as possible".

It's easy for me to throw together a small house, shed or bridge, but chances are whatever I build -- if it doesn't immediately collapse -- is horribly overbuilt for its purpose, because I don't know how to calculate and analyze the various stresses and material capacities well enough to size everything to a proper margin. So when I build a bridge I use lumber that is bigger than I think I need and use more of it than I think I need until it feels quite solid, but if I were a proper engineer I could figure out the exact right amount to use.

An engineer designs right to failure, and then multiplies the numbers required till he feels safe.

Wow. People here still criticising the solutions the engineers on the scene used?

All jobs are easy to the person who doesn't have to do them. ~Hold's Law

;-)

They built a computer model to try and manage the stress on the ship as they worked to free it. It was not straightforward as the ship could have broken if they weren't extremely careful. They also had divers inspecting the hull for signs of stress. This was a massive, complex operation.

That sounds terrifying for the divers

Boskalis Peter Berdowski said it wans't a very hard job technically on Dutch television. Just the scale and impact were huge.

It's like the guy at a bar who tells you he knows how to swordfight after doing fencing. I'm sure he's right but it just funny from an official with experience basically saying "it wasn't that hard."

Boskalis is the company who brought the tugboats, engineers, diggers and whatnot over there in days. This is not a random guy commenting. This is an end-boss in charge of the entire operation.

They brought over a few tugs, but the large majority were Egyptian. Not belittling Boskalis' work in the operation, but don't think that the Egyptians don't understand maritime operations in the canal.

And I'm guessing that the operation was overseen by the Suez Canal administration, not Boskalis. Not saying that there wasn't delegation, but I'm guessing a joint management operation between the canal, the ship's management, the salvage operator and the local ship captains.

I'm sorry if it sounded like Boskalis "saved the day". I was trying to make the point that his is not a random internet person commenting on stuff. Not trying to imply that he's the one running the entire operation.

Can you image if the hull did weaken to the point of near failure? They might have needed to offload everything right there where it ran aground, lest it completely fail uncontrolled. The canal would be closed for a very long time. Luckily they didn't have to make that call.

Luckily, indeed — but they were already planning for this contingency. Apparently (and unsurprisingly) it was going to be hard to find a large enough crane to move the containers.

The beauty of steel is that it will yield plastically beyond its normal design stress. It would have been possible for them to damage the ship to the point where it required significant repairs but still be capable of exiting the canal.

This reminds me of a former boss who told me to "just add some if statements, how long can it take?"

anyone can build a bridge that stands. only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands.

High tide did more than anything. If it had gone beyond Wednesday they likely would have been screwed as the high tide was set to start dropping each day after Tuesday. Good thing they started dredging right away.

You say that like they just got unexpectedly lucky, but all mariners are well aware of and take tides into account in their planning.

I’d be surprised if they aimed for their ship to arrive n days before the spring tide in case it got stuck. That just doesn’t sound like an efficient operation. In this case the luck was that the high tides were relatively high when it was stuck. If we were in a neap tide, we might have had to wait longer for a high enough tide to get the ship out. (But maybe if tides were lower it wouldn’t have gotten so stuck)

P.S. it isn’t exactly clear what you mean by mariner, but plenty of sailors in the Mediterranean don’t really need to care about tides as they don’t really get them there. Indeed, you shouldn’t trust any of the early modern Greek or Italian treatises attempting to explain tides as their authors didn’t really know how tides actually behaved outside the Med.

> I’d be surprised if they aimed for their ship to arrive n days before the spring tide in case it got stuck.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that after the ship got stuck, they certainly incorporated the tides into their plan for how to unstick it. If the tides had been less amenable, they would have come up with a different plan.

So their plan didn't get "lucky", their plan was predicated on the tides being part of the solution.

Without the high tides the amount of material needed to be removed would have been dramatically higher.

That’s the point and the absolute bit of luck. Without the high tides they likely wouldn’t have been able to get it unstuck as quickly. Search for slope/fill volume calculation charts - the amount of fill required to be removed as you go deeper is logarithmic, NOT linear.

It was VERY lucky they had the highest tides possible.

Did the ship crash during high tide or low tide? The tide 6 days ago when it got stuck compared to today is more important.

What? Tide mattered more now because it had a significant impact on getting it out quickly.

Luckily it wasn’t nearly as high when it beached itself - but if it had beached itself on the downslope of the peak tide instead of the upslope it very likely would still be stuck!

Tide when it crashed was not nearly as significant as when it got free.

I disagree, i think you got that backwards - the tide level at the time of the beaching has surely had an effect on at what point it started plowing and was being decelerated and subsequently how far in absolute numbers evergreen went into the rim.

Imagine getting stuck during spring tide vs low tide hich is more than 2m lower and would have decelerated the ever given earlier

Sure but the luck here is the number of days until a sufficiently high tide. Imagine a simple model where every 28 days you get a sufficiently high tide and every other day is not sufficiently high, and the ship gets stuck (after high tide) on a uniformly random day. Then the expected time until the ship is unstuck is 14.5 days and the luck is how close you are to the time the ship can get free.

It's even shorter timing than that. Spring tides occur at the full moon AND the new moon. So you get two chances every lunar cycle.

The "spring tide", the highest of the high tides, naturally occurs twice every 28 days. This is when the Sun, Earth and Moon are in a line. So the average wait would have been ~7 days.

That's not what he said.

Ship captains who sail on open ocean are well aware of tides. It is not too difficult to imagine somebody did 2+2 and figured out the tides are getting higher so in couple of days there is going to be better chance of freeing it.

Obviously they did not plan it. It is just an opportunity they used.

You talk about planning about an article about a container ship piloted by professionals ran aground.

So your saying they planned to only crash the ship during the high tide?

You do realize the canal operates during all tides?

So yes, it was absolute luck this accident happed right before the highest tides of the month.

I think you and the other poster are saying different things. You are saying it’s fortunate that a spring tide was coming and you are right. I think grand parent is saying that sailors are well aware of tides and as soon as the ship got stuck they would have been racing to meet the spring tide, which was planning and not luck.

I just adore that us little humans got our big boat stuck in the sand and uncle moon had to reach down and fix it for us.

Auntie Luna

The moon is masculine in Germanic mythology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1ni

But there are two high tides and two low tides a day. Why did it take a week? /s

Some tug boats did sail in from far away places.

Keeping in mind that the tugs on each side had to come from opposite directions because the canal is blocked, I expect there was a bit of a commute.

Why wouldn't it be more cost-effective or unreasonable to destroy the ship?

They would still be cleaning up the debris to unblock the canal, shipping would still be blocked.

Problems with destroying the ship:

- A sunken super container ship in the canal, rather than a floating one. Removing the wreckage would be at least an order of magnitude more work than floating the thing away.

- Thousands of containers floating / sunk in the canal. How much damage can one of those do to the propeller of a ship?

Thank you, I know it's a dumb question. Wondering about the cost/effectiveness of demolition of the ship vs the daily costs of having the canal blocked. I thought it might be like using explosives to dispose of whale carcasses.

Have you ever tried to cut tires of the car that blocked your driveway? Did it help to clear the blockage faster or exactly the opposite?

because unlike videogames, object in real life don't despawn after you punch/shoot them.

if you destroy the ship, it sinks. And since its blocking shallow canal, you just made problem 10x worse.

What I wonder about: how is such a rescue contract negotiated? There is likely willingness to pay, but it is difficult to judge what a reasonable price is, and it may not even be clear who is culpable in advance. Do they have contracts in advance with the shipping companies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_salvage#Types_of_salvag...:

In contract salvage the owner of the property and salvor enter into a salvage contract prior to the commencement of salvage operations and the amount that the salvor is paid is determined by the contract. This can be a fixed amount, based on a "time and materials" basis, or any other terms that both parties agree to. The contract may also state that payment is only due if the salvage operation is successful (a.k.a. "No Cure, No Pay"), or that payment is due even if the operation is not successful. By far the commonest single form of salvage contract internationally is Lloyd's Standard Form of Salvage Agreement (2011), an English law arbitration agreement administered by the Council of Lloyd's, London.

That Lloyd’s contract (https://www.lloyds.com/~/media/files/the%20market/tools%20an...) is concise (2 pages).

It may incorporate the SCOPIC clause (https://www.lloyds.com/resources-and-services/lloyds-agency/...), but that doesn’t seem long, either, even including its appendices.

Thanks!

I would imagine a cost plus contract?

I would assume that Egypt paid. They have by far the biggest incentive to clear the canal asap. They will presumably now enter a lengthy legal dispute to try and get their money back from the shipping company.

My understanding is that the Suez Canal Authority will have to pay, but also that the SCA requires the use of "pilot" captains that maneuver the boats through the canal, which means that the issue was squarely the fault of the SCA.

So, like paying for emergency healthcare in the United States.

The major threads appear to be:

Giant Ship Is Moved To and Fro to Break Suction: Suez Update - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26617430 - March 2021 (229 comments)

Ever Given Everywhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26617081 - March 2021 (63 comments)

Ever Given Ships Erratic Route into Suez Canal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603778 - March 2021 (37 comments)

Ever Given Container Ship Fan Fiction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593708 - March 2021 (33 comments)

HMM Rotterdam appears to be diverting to avoid congestion at Suez - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590105 - March 2021 (49 comments)

The bank effect and the big boat blocking the Suez - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586866 - March 2021 (92 comments)

Suez Canal: How are they trying to free the Ever Given? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586278 - March 2021 (83 comments)

It 'Might Take Weeks' to Free Ship Stuck in Suez Canal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585480 - March 2021 (51 comments)

Is that ship still stuck? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282 - March 2021 (1229 comments)

Suez canal blocked by a massive ship - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560319 - March 2021 (426 comments)

Others?

Is that ship still stuck? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282 - March 2021 (1230 comments)

Ah thanks! Inserted.

I wonder how much the couple of excavators helped. I saw people on HN saying having two measly excavators was just to give the appearance of doing something and not an actual attempt to get the boat unstuck. But when I saw a photo of the digging, it looked like there was some serious progress made.

I wonder how they think the canal was created.

I’m actually really curious about this! It was built in the mid 19th century, was there excavators then? Or was it shovels and manpower? I looked on wikipedia hoping to find some info, but was sadly disappointed. I would TOTALLY read an in depth article on how, practically, the Suez canal was actually built.

"Construction began in April 1859, and at first digging was done by hand with picks and shovels wielded by forced laborers. Later, European workers with dredgers and steam shovels arrived"

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/suez-canal-opens

Depiction of a steam dregdger working on the Suez Canal

https://www.alamy.com/suez-dredgers-canal-build-dig-excavate...

I'd imagine a lot of explosions too. Most big excavation back then used explosions but also a lot of individual manpower as well.

Slaves, lots and lots of slaves, many of whom died. Exactly as you'd imagine something of epic proportions being made in the 19th century.

It was built with corvee labor, which is not quite the same thing: unpaid, yes, but done by farmers etc as a form of taxation in kind.

Taxation imposed by the state, but I haven't been able to find any citation of a tax code so to speak.

It seems like state sponsored slavery, without a trade. That is no persons are being sold because they are simply using citizens

Brutal.

Oh come now, governments can’t impose slavery - it was just taxation after all /s

Slavery doesn't have to do with whether it was paid or not (many slaves have historically been paid as well) but rather the voluntariness of their work.

I read it was six, running 24 hours a day, which moved 27,000 metric tons of sand.

Which, sounds like a lot of sand to me. Seems like software engineers would have the best understanding of slowly but steadily working towards a goal since that's been my life since I started in this field!

But, also, I admittedly bit the hype train too on how hard it was going to be to get this thing dislodged.

I think that number is from the dredgers rather than the excavators. Dredgers (ships) can shift sand faster than dozens of excavators.

It looks like you would be correct! Although the 27,000 metric tons appears to have been on point.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-56547383

Thanks for providing a source!

A cubic meter of wet sand weighs about 2 metric tons. 24/7 excavation is easy to underestimate like sailing ship traversal under way: yes, a sailing ship only makes 4 knots (or whatever), but it dies so for 168 hours a week.

Apparently the high tides were maximized and were a big factor. Credit to the Moon!

so you're saying wallstreetbets played a hand in this?

Diamond hands on the dredgers. We like the ship!

Aye by dredge boats running massively large slurry pumps. My partner works for a company that manufactures said pumps, they can MOVE SOME SLUDGE. Think the same sort of setup they use for underwater gold mining, but on a way way more massive scale. You can literally stand up inside some of the impellers they make.

Measly in comparison to the ship, but by no means measly in an absolute sense. Those were pretty impressive excavators.

One picture from very early on in the crisis (the one with the single excavator) was used as the mental model for the site long after pictures stopped being seen from there.

"Helped by the peak of high tide, the flotilla of tugboats managed to wrench the bow of the stranded Ever Given from the canal’s sandy bank, where it had been firmly lodged since last Tuesday." - https://www.vesselfinder.com/news/20501-Ever-Given-is-Finall...

Isn't it the Evergreen?

Edit: Thank you for all the corrections, will leave this up for anyone else that's curious.

Evergreen is the company, Ever given is the boat.

Evergreen is the name of the company, all of their ships have an Ever prefix. This one is called the Ever Given

Evergreen is a huge Taiwanese shipping company, Ever Given is the name of this particular ship.

There are probably several dozen ships around the world with the words "Evergreen" on its side.

Evergreen is the shipping company, ever given is the name of the ship

A small addition: Here is the link to the wikipedia article that also tells you about their hotel and airline business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Group

(Cue jokes about earth (they have trucks) and water blockages soon to be followed by air. I haven't seen a good fire theory yet.)

I spent the first half hour learning about all this being really confused when I kept seeing Evergreen written on the side of the ship (and not the much smaller Ever Given near the bow.)

https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/EVER-GIVEN-IMO-9811000-...

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:56...

I wish to see a satellite photos to see a traffic jam from the above. It is definitely not too common to see that many ships waiting in queue to entry the Suez canal [0].

[0]: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:32.3/cente...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/mf705...

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/meopv9/s...

That's Bay of Bengal, not Suez. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sujeeva-salwatura-49341a36_fa...

They got traffic flowing sooner than I guessed they could. Three container ships and a livestock carrier have left Bitter lake and are entering the channel right now, heading for Suez. The third one in the group is the Ever Globe, the same size as the stuck ship.

I had thought it would take most of today to make sure the channel was clear for the deepest draught vessels. The dredge crews must have done a good job keeping their discharge out of the main channel.

Vesselfinder.com is a hoot to follow for this kind of disaster.

> The third one in the group is the Ever Globe, the same size as the stuck ship.

What could go wrong.

Was it reported how it got stuck in the first place?

The ship's operators blamed a sandstorm and high winds.

High winds + sandstorm reduced visibility.

This is a pretty good synopsis of the situation as of Sunday

https://youtu.be/5iyn2q6s1Sk

They blamed a sandstorm, but the Taiwanese operator blamed the Japanese owner for it. And the Japanese operator agrees. Basically, we're not getting the real answer to this question. Also, the following:

> However, the chairman of Egypt's Suez Canal Authority said Saturday, without giving details, that weather conditions "were not the main reasons" for the grounding, and that "there may have been technical or human reasons," the BBC reported. An investigation is ongoing.

If it turns out to be human error related, how much liability falls on the actual ship's captain versus the required canal pilot?

Google “Costa Concordia” for a simulation of that scenario.

Not at all comparable, because in this case as far as I know two pilots were on board. Pilots are required for the passage through the Suez Canal.

Usually the pilots are giving steering commands to the helmsman, but the Captain still has the final responsibility for the ship.

If you're up for a bit of a humorous take on the matter, this video is great; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh9KBwqGxTI

Given that any human being crewing this ship or working in the Suez very likely lacks 59 billion dollars, the answer to this question is very probably "It doesn't matter."

Technically the pilot is in control of the ship and bears all liability at that time (or rather, the canal authority).

But it's an open secret the canal pilots are just slacking off, so a court may as well rule with the de facto situation and hold the captain and the operator responsible.

It does not work like that on the seas. Maritime legal conventions are are ratified by 99% countries on the globe. A shipowner is alwayd insured against these things, and the i surance company is also insured (reinsurance). So nobody will end up in a lifetime of serfdom because of this.

Shit hits the fan on the high seas all the time. We nornally don't hear about it in regular media.

It matters whose insurance company pays, though.

TIL about insurance insurance

There is no way the only reason was because of the wind. I mean if because of strong wind boats become uncontrollable we would have this kind of event pretty frequently. So it is clearly something else, (which may have been emphasized by a strong wind, or have been triggered by a strong wind)

The short version I got is that a sand storm threw them slightly of course, while reacting they oversteered a bit, becoming too fast, which then lead to different fluid dynamic processes, once they were out of the deep water they couldn't do anything anymore.

But detailed analysis yet has to be done.

High winds and the hydrodynamics of large boats in small channels.

https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d...

Some videos of boats celebrating by honking their horns here. You can't really see the boat moving, but I hope someone's filmed a timelapse!

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/suez-ca...

Here's a somewhat good compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovWoznPIBhw

For those who are wondering.

The canal is shallow at the sides, for a ship as this, this creates a suction when it's not in the middle.

The captain wasn't going straight ( zigzag) and while he wanted to get out of the suction on the left side, the ship turned way too much to the right.

There's a really good animation here at 1:03 in the video ( dutch): https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2021/03/29/zeevaartschool-maakt...

Video is talking about a "sea driving school" that simulated the incident in their simulator.

My info above is the Dutch information required to see the video from 1:03 till after the animation.

I wonder why the previous link to track it is not working again. Would have been cool to see it navigating the canal:

https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000

Is OK for me but maybe the web server is submerged under the load

Unfortunately at 02:53:44 GMT a web request which, due to high botnet activity and a packet storm, experienced poor routing conditions and unfortunately became wedged in one of the major transatlantic fiber optic cables. Network operators are working to free the stuck request. It is estimated that 50 billion requests per minute are queueing in the cable which will soon become filled if the situation is not resolved quickly. Experts fear the effects to international browsing, and some requests have already begun to take "the long way around."

I know we typically don’t upvote humor here, but that was really good.

> imo=9811000

I find it neat? strange? that IMO numbers have checksums:

> An IMO number is made of the three letters "IMO" followed by a seven-digit number. This consists of a six-digit sequential unique number followed by a check digit. The integrity of an IMO number can be verified using its check digit. This is done by multiplying each of the first six digits by a factor of 2 to 7 corresponding to their position from right to left. The rightmost digit of this sum is the check digit. For example, for IMO 9074729: (9×7) + (0×6) + (7×5) + (4×4) + (7×3) + (2×2) = 139.[10][11]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMO_number#Structure

MMSI numbers do not:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_Mobile_Service_Identi...

Was this comment intended for a different thread?

Probably not. The site linked uses imo numbers for ship ids.

> I find it neat? strange? that IMO numbers have checksums:

It’s a relatively common feature of ID numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm

Any info how it was freed? Article does not mention any solutions.

WSJ posted an article with some more detail.

TLDR; high tide and dredging

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ship-blocking-suez-canal-is-par...

https://archive.is/DD9PB

Does Evergreen get fined for something like this? Is there enforceable law here? Or just say sorry and life goes on?

Ships going through the canal are commanded by Egyption pilots, so it's doubtful that Evergreen has any responsibility.

That would make the Egyptian government responsible. But I'd be stunned if it paid or apologized to anyone.

Suez Canal policy (enforced by contracts) removes liability from the Authority and its pilots. Also worth noting that the pilots don't control the helm directly. That doesn't mean it wasn't their fault :) We may never know.

Iirc, the actual captain does not pilot through the harbor, there are specific pilots that take your vessel through. So it seems unlikely that there would be any liability to the ship crew or owner.

YouTube video by Cheif Makoi pointed out that the Master of the ship is responsible for any issue caused by the ship, even if commanded by a pilot.

https://youtu.be/ltdHRdtEHE4

Obviously I am not a legal expert

I was wondering about the sheer size of those ships. Could they get even bigger than 400 metres? Is there a limit?

From this (very good) FT article https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d...

"But the specific engineering of container ships mean that they can’t get longer; they have to get wider. An oil tanker is a shoe box with a lid: hull on the bottom, oil in the middle, deck on top. But a container ship is a shoebox without a lid: hull on the bottom, then containers all the way up. It’s not as strong without the lid.

There are definitely hydrodynamic forces in the open ocean, it’s just that the ocean is usually in charge of them. And the biggest stress on a ship’s hull in heavy weather happens along the longitudinal bending moment — lengthwise, between the bow and the stern. The longer a ship gets, the worse the stress gets when a wave pushes up in the wrong place. As far as length goes for container ships, “we are at the limitations of welding and steel quality,” says Lataire. “I will not say that it is impossible to weld thicker plates, but in a way this is the economic limit.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/7r85ji/s...

Well, that was a really short few weeks.

Guess I was wrong. Glad that didn't become a bigger issue.

has anyone done the analysis based on the backlog of ships waiting to pass whether it is worth going around Africa? ie. If you are #130+ in the backlog go around?

I honestly love that it was freed using the "boring" solution. No need for any of the crazy solutions people proposed on the internet. Just careful and measured execution of proven techniques.

Not surprised. It's directly available, and there's a lot of experience. And the consequences and costs are known. But probably other companies were already working on alternatives. I wouldn't be surprised if Elon would send a small, custom built sub next week.

It's the only practical solution really.

Cranes - Likely on a barge, on a relatively narrow canal. That's quite precarious. And make that two for both sides (canal is impassable).

Heavy lift helicopters - Even the few multiple automated cranes capable of handling a ship this size take days to unload it. Also these helicopters are quite expensive to operate.

Floatation devices - See Costa Concordia salvage operations. Lots of consideration for structural stress. Lots of mounting points on the ship. Lots of actual engineering needed for the floatation devices themselves.

Agreed.

Cranes - the ones used in ports are absolutely massive. Not realistic.

Helicopter not possible. Max lift is the M-26 at 44,000 lbs and containers are rated for about 60,000 loaded lbs.

Flotation is unlikely due to lack of water depth. Bouyant force is based on displaced water.

As long as the ship remained intact, dredging and tugging was almost certain to work. Ultimately a simple problem. Just a matter of time. Of course, keeping the ship intact wasn't a certainty, so even beyond economic pressures, moving quickly was important.

They moved a bit slow at first before they realized how bad it really was. After that, it seemed like they did a great job getting the right experts involved and making it all happen about as quick as could be expected given all the logistics.

Heavy containers tend to be loaded further down in the ship.

Yes, this was what one would call the default approach of digging and tugging. I am very glad it worked. However, there was a distinct possibility, that this approach would not have worked, and I think all the discussions were about possible alternative approaches. If the high tide at full moon had not provided enough lift, then they would have had to figure out a way to unload the ship.

On the down side, because the solution was so boring, they are likely to learn much less from this experience.

Choose Boring Technology

Should make a company around that!

Interesting. If I see correctly on https://www.vesselfinder.com/ there are three big ships going into the canal north to south now. Seems a bit inefficient! To speak in TCP terms, they should increase their window size!

I take that back, that was just for a couple of minutes. The windows size is actually huge!

It's not free yet [1]... Still time for something to go wrong. For example, it's entirely possible they did hull damage whilst dragging it out.

[1] https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000

It's free and has moved up the canal quite a bit now.

It seems to be out of immediate danger, but the canal is much longer after the rest-area. I imagine they'll pull it aside to inspect the hull in this area to ensure it won't sink further up the canal?

Now, understand all those ships will take a long time to pass the canal and then even longer time processing at their ports of destination which will also have their schedules completely disrupted.

Does anybody know at what percentage of capacity the canal usually operates?

Apparently they are going to double throughput for the next few days compared to normal traffic, so they had some spare capacity.

Double throughput means it will still take about 4-5 days to clear the backlog (new ships are arriving and queuing up even as the backlog is being cleared).

Is that mostly a matter of going for longer convoys on the sections where ships in opposite directions cannot pass?

I hope they'll give priority to ships with living animals that reported that they have feed just for a few days, and not just to whoever pays the most. Backlog will probably still take some time to clear.

I suppose the Suez Canal is going to find out what rush-hour traffic is like.

So, did they let it into the Canal, or did it go to the back of the line?

The ever given was towed north to bitter lake and is anchored there with two other vessels attending it. The ever globe is the third vessel in the first convoy south from bitter lake to Suez. The first two vessels have passed the location of the accident. The ever globe is the same size as ever given and is right now very slowly passing the place where ever given was stuck.

Had to think of that Simpson's episode where MacGyver appears and says something like "Don't thank me, thank the gravitational pull of the moon". Well, it seems that that line wasn't complete nonsense at all :-)

I'm brushing up my Arabic so I can understand the interview with that excavator's operator.

Link to the interview?

There are several. But I can't type in Arabic to save my life, so it will be some time before I can find it.

Some feedback that will help better understanding of costs.

1. A medium size container vessel (10k TEUS) with abt 15kts speeds will cost the same as the canal transit cost now that the fuel is relatively cheap, compared to the Africa voyage. But you save time.

2. Major liners (APM, MSC, etc), enjoy significant discounts over face value for the canal transits as they commit volumes. The discounts could be north of 30%+, but not publicly available. WILHELMSEN has a nice calculator

3. There is no scenario that something cannot be monetized, either it will be fuel or time or both. As such any financial loss due to the canal clocking can be calculated. The vessel’s P&I will be very busy.

Suez Canal Authority makes $5.6 billion per year, so a week's loss of throughput would be in the order of $100 million.

But most of the put will go through in the end, only the ones that chose to go the long way round will be the actual loss. Barring any delay discounts of course (if that is a thing).

I do believe that this incident was a demonstration of how easy it would be to disrupt the world economy via terror.

What a surprise it didn’t need nuclear ordinance or building giant elaborate dams or millions of helicopters.

Pretty disappointing, honestly.

We wanted the hero to be a Death Star, but in the end it was just the moon.

It's been blocked before but for a lot longer (from late 1956 to early 1957—about five months) during the Suez Crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis

That was a really big deal—more so than this one, I still remember the daily radio news reports and huge newspaper headlines from when I was a young kid. It was an international crisis that dragged on for months and months.

It was closed for 8 years after the 6 day war.

Yeah, right. I recall that too, it got to the point where shipping had gotten used to taking the long way around. Towards the end, everyone had become so used to the fact (and the delays) that we'd almost forgotten the canal existed.

Maybe there's now some virtue in dusting off the old proposal for second canal route via Israeli territory (of course, sans the nukes this time).

The canal was closed between 1967 and 1975, and some ships had bad timing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Fleet

The "crisis" was actually a war in which the UK, France, and Israel invaded Egypt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal#Suez_Crisis

"To save the British from what he thought was a disastrous action and to stop the war from a possible escalation, Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester B. Pearson proposed the creation of the first United Nations peacekeeping force to ensure access to the canal for all and an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula. On 4 November 1956, a majority at the United Nations voted for Pearson's peacekeeping resolution, which mandated the UN peacekeepers to stay in Sinai unless both Egypt and Israel agreed to their withdrawal. The United States backed this proposal by putting pressure on the British government through the selling of sterling, which would cause it to depreciate. Britain then called a ceasefire, and later agreed to withdraw its troops by the end of the year. Pearson was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."

Timeghost has a great series on this:

https://youtu.be/3tnxiJ9n1c8

I think this incident really highlights how easily the Suez can be blocked.

A well hidden explosive charge on a container ship in the canal could cause a multi-month blockage - perhaps longer.

It would probably be smart to dig a 2nd channel.

Then the terrorists would need two bombs! But I think they will extend the 2nd channel - some is done already.

There is a second channel for most of its length already. I'm sure the plans to finish the work have gotten a higher priority in the past week.

Just to be clear: The ship is still there and still stuck. They were just able to straighten it enough (parallel to the shore) to be out of the way and no longer blocking boat traffic.

Edit: I think I saw an earlier article, other reports are now saying it's fully floating and moving.

Are you sure? It seems to be moving out of the channel now: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000

After all the crazy engineering ideas they used a load of tugboats when the tide was good? Not as sexy as a nuclear warhead though, eh.

I feel like there's something to be learnt about computer engineering. We naturally go towards ego-massaging solutions.

This comment really made me chuckle. I did enjoy reading the suggestions on the other thread, but not many were entirely... practical (edit for spelling)

I don't see the problem in guessing what approaches would have been possible in which situation and wondering about it. Learning something new about a topic you wouldn't encounter elsewhere in discussion. Because after all, isn't that why we are here in the first place?

That aside, the idea of raising the water was valid and was ( luckily) available though nature. It wasn't mentioned before it appeared here. See: High tides.

And cofferdams could have been used when the situation was much worse. But the logistics of organizing it would have been painful ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26587692 )

Which is what followed when bringing up: "temporal dams" surrounding the ship. Which is obviously very different than "building giant elaborate dams".

But ofc, not everyone actually reads the things that are said and some just interpret their own prejudice. Degrading the whole discussion.

Fortunately TWTR's market cap is worth more than a solution to problems like this because...

Nice gif showing the ship movement on FleetMon: https://twitter.com/yukihilog/status/1376377678626844676

Score one for Boskalis. Those tugs are very impressive.

Anyone got a contact there? https://suezcanal.statuspage.io/ is still showing down.

I do hope it tooted its horn to celebrate.

Er, this party ain't over 'til the weight-challenged lady's cleared the exit door

I still think they should have added another ship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PLzaSEj-GY

shame

I'm somewhat disappointed we didn't get to observe huge container lifting operation. https://xkcd.com/611/

boo!

Free as in beer?

Looks like https://istheshipstillstuck.com/ has updated their message!

And you get Rickrolled if you stay on the page long enough.

All of the sudden I had Rick Astley playing loudly in my computer and I was like "WTF?".

Well played, well played.

I got solidly caught as well. If you're lucky enough, you can also get https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPCJIB1f7jk.

  Object(c.useEffect)((function() {
    var e = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ";
    Math.random() > .999 && (e = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPCJIB1f7jk"),
    setTimeout((function() {
      return window.location.href = e
      }
    ), 9e4)
  }

Thank you, I was wondering how I ended up with two Ricks singing at me this morning.

The real rickroll occurs after buying that page's NFT and realizing what they just did to you.

I wonder what their $59b cost is based on?

I've heard from multiple sources that about $9b per day in commerce goes through the Suez, so that's probably just $9b * number of days stuck. I imagine the cost is actually quite a bit more, as the ripple effect from this traffic jam will continue for at least another month while shipments are diverted or delayed until traffic pressure returns to normal.

It's not like the $9b of daily commerce that can't get through the canal is being set alight and tipped overboard, it will reach its destination in the end. Some of that produce might have gone off, or the delay in its arrival causes knock-on costs, but the final cost is only going to be a fraction of that figure, not a large multiple!

I agree that it won't be a large multiple, but, I do think it's naive to assume that it'll be a fraction of the cost. Consider the shear volume of stuff being transported. Millions of tons of goods across hundreds of delayed transports, some perishable, some with tight timeline requirements, some with tight contract requirements. And it's not like as soon as ships start moving again all of that cost will go away. Ships are still going to be diverted for weeks of not months to relieve traffic pressure.

If it's really time-critical, it's shipped by air, not sea. Container ships being delayed by a few days by rough weather, port delays etc happens all the time, and we're looking at a week tops here even for directly impacted ships.

I never said a large multiple. Regardless, below are some numbers that could get us started in estimating costs:

1) https://www.nber.org/digest/jun12/time-trade-barrier

I would image the opposite tbh, that $9b of delayed goods per day is not lost, it's just delayed. Most of that goods, unless they are perishable goods, will sell like normal, just a bit later.

There is obviously a loss here on increased costs and loss of sell opportunities due to the delay, but that figures are mega inflated IMO.

Also... ships are slow. The voyage from the Suez canal to Rotterdam or Hamburg is at least six days, so there was quite some time to prepare for a gap in supply.

Well, this is a supply delay in hundreds of equally sized or larger ships. This is a delay in a majority of the global shipping industry of at LEAST a week, and shipping scheduling will be thrown off for months by this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/mf705...

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/meopv9/s...

That is a LOT of cargo that's suddenly going to arrive 2 or 3 times later than expected. Huge economic impact. I really don't understand why people on HN are pushing so hard against the idea that this is just an economic blip.

Is there anyone involved in the industry that can chime in?

According to this paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the average loss of value per day of delay from the cargo on these ships is between 0.6 and 2.2 percent [1]. According to other research I've seen, somewhere between 12% and 30% of daily global sea trade (the 30% figure may be out large cargo freighters specifically, not sure) goes through the Suez Canal. Anyone want to do the math?

1) https://www.nber.org/digest/jun12/time-trade-barrier

A better calculation is to see how much Egypt makes per day in Canal fees and use that as an estimate, as the canal fees are set to make it just a bit cheaper to use the canal vs the horn.

$14M/day seems to be the usual media estimate. I think it's safe to say the knock-on effects of several hundred ships being delayed will be more than that.

I saw the figure "$400 million per hour" in some press coverage, probably that

Me too! Seems quite excessive for such a simple website.

The website offers related book recommendations. I would also recommend Alex Madrigal’s Containers podcast series. [1] [2] [3]

[1]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/containers/id120955917... "iTunes"

[2]: https://soundcloud.com/containersfmg "SoundCloud"

[3]: https://www.stitcher.com/show/containers "Stitcher"

Somewhat related is the classic "How to Avoid Huge Ships":

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Avoid-Huge-Ships-John-Trimmer/dp/08...

Quick, time to buy the NFT they advertise at the bottom of their website before the excitement abates! /s

Good thing hacker news doesn't run large civil engineering projects.

That thread was a good chuckle though -- a bunch of mostly software devs brainstorming on freeing one of the biggest containers ships from their comfy armchairs. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282

I learned how not to get rid of a whale at least.

In case I’m ever asked about that...

"The remaining chunks were of such a size, no respectable seagull would attempt to tackle anyway."

This guy assume gull's are respectable.

Man I hope this guy had an amazing career, because that was an awesome report.

Yes some of the options would have been fairly spectacular at least.

You know, I used to think that HN was a collection of some of the smartest people on the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, there are some incredible people here. But I guess what I have learned over the past 10 years is that HN has as many blind spots as any other online forum. If you want SV advice, this is the place to be. If you want to dislodge a stuck mega ship, look elsewhere.

HN is a lot of amazing experts in a particular subject mostly talking about something else. It's fascinating in this way.

I just re-read that old thread and to be honest, on the whole the advice there is sound. I saw comments discounting the fanciful speculation outnumbering the speculation by at least a multiple of two.

There are silly ideas in every forum. I've been on plenty groups comprised entirely of tech experts and I can confidently say that foolish ideas will be proposed even in the most elite of circles, even in their areas of specialty. It happens, and as long as there are other reasonable voices it's fine.

It's the classic "expertise is universal" fallacy. When we see someone who is an expert in their field, we assume that expertise carries over to totally unrelated fields, when this is emphatically not the case. Being a genius does not prevent someone from being ignorant; the finite nature of time means every genius is almost completely uninformed on almost every topic, and without information what you get is GIGO.

I suspect that many (but not all) of the “crazy” suggestions were a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Which I think is fine? Isn't it fun to imagine how you would unstick a huge boat, even if your idea is totally off the mark due to a bad application of lateral thinking? Be it helium balloons or falcon heavy lifting rockets.

Oh yes, great fun to be had by all. You'll hear no complaints from me.

Or repeatedly exploding nukes behind it to convert it into the first space going Orion container vessel....

Or ramming another containership into it.

Yeah, the part that is missing are the experts who can take those "crazy" suggestions and explain, in accurate detail, all of the reasons why there are better ideas.

Along with detailed explanations of the better ideas.

As it was, we kind of just got stuck on the jokes and random thoughts.

There's a whole industry around ship recovery and they know how to do things like patch things back together with some light underwater welding and then pump the water back out the hole in the bottom with compressed air. Lots of times, this is done while the ship is busy worrying itself to death on a reef.

Ship salvage is a combination of batshit crazy and real-time engineering marvel with a healthy dose of understanding tides waves and currents. There's also a strange maritime law business going on where the captain and or insurance company have to sign a contract. IF the ship is a 'wreck' the salvage company gets what ever they can save or whatever it's agreed on in the contract. If it just needs some help, the contract will be lighter. But many ships have sunk completely while the insurance company and salvage company have argued over whether it was a total loss or just suck in a low tide.

I always find the salvage stories to be super interesting. Seeing people do hard ball business while the ship is breaking up under them is really something else.

Reminded me of the Kathryn Spirit ; "After years of immobility, the federal government awarded an $11-million contract last year to a conglomeration of businesses to dismantle the ship. Ironically, one of the companies picked was the same one that abandoned the wreck in 2011."

Where: "years"=8

"Built in 1967, the Kathryn Spirit has not had an owner since 2015, at which point the federal government took control. The ship, which had been used as a cargo ship in the past, had been towed to Beauharnois in 2011 by the Groupe St-Pierre, which wanted to dismantle it in the St. Lawrence River to then sell the scrap metal."

https://www.westislandblog.com/abandoned-vessel-kathryn-spir...

The smartest ones are maybe not the ones providing suggestions?

Then again, it's fun to speculate, and what are these threads for if not to provoke thought? Maybe it's fine for people to imagine and try to put themselves in the place of the professionals working on the problem. You can interpret the comments here as an indicator of dangerous human hubris if you want, but I think most of the people here understand that they can't do any harm by posting naive speculations on HN.

In my opinion, we should save our outrage for people who make an active attempt to be taken seriously and affect the actions of more qualified people, such as the guy who posted the bizarre (and possibly satirical?) account of his attempt to build a system for guiding doctors' treatment decisions.

some of the suggestions seemed borderline condescending

e.g. "why don't they just do X"

as tho' the actual experienced engineers working over there on the problem couldn't come up with better ideas than some guy who happens to spend a lot of their day on the internet.

It actually happens quite often and you can get handsomely rewarded for being that some guy ;

https://www.innocentive.com/

Have fun ! :D

"why don't they just do X" can be a great question. Why not just use Riemann integrals for everything? Why not use timestamps as ids? Not knowing the answer is a good enough reason for asking, and I don't feel like I need to police people's feelings and decide if they were feeling curious or condescending when they asked. They'll learn either way, when the question is answered.

I can imagine some people might have asked questions in a disingenuous or insinuating way ("why trust vaccines if the supposed experts can't get a ship unstuck") but I did not personally see any of that.

"Why don't they just do X" has two interpretations:

1. "This is such a simple solution and I think they're dumb for not doing it."

2. "X seems like a great and obvious idea, but they aren't doing it. Therefore, there must be something they know but I don't, and I'm interested in learning it."

I try to take the second interpretation whenever I see someone posing solutions in that manner.

I had great fun reading about the number of helicopters and starships needed to lift the ship and probably took something away from it for future endeavours. Really great for thinking about scale.

The way I look at it is, if I’m here, then there’s a strong statistical probability that a bunch of other clueless superficially intelligent people like me found their way here too. I just hope anyone I encounter is smarter than I am.

As correct as that is, I don't think anyone was actually thinking those were good ideas. There's something really innocently funny about this episode of history, and honestly it's fun to just think about what-ifs. Could you build surge walls all the way along and use some kind of dam? Combine all the power of every helicopter to lift the whole thing? Big ships are fun, unwieldy objects getting stuck are fun, sometimes it's just fun to mess around.

I wonder if there is a forum of marine engineers somewhere speculating on how Google (or whoever) should fix a service outage...

I enjoy reading all the various ideas people come up to solve a complex issue. I know it's mostly not realistic but always good to see how imagination come forth.

With more robots and drones, only a matter of time before we have Twitch controlling atoms instead of bits? [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10477721 "Show HN: Twitch Installs Arch Linux"

I remember people in that discussion saying the high tide might help and suggesting pumping water around the boat to remove the sand. The HN discussion included the right answer, among a lot of more entertaining ideas.

I think a lot of the HN suggestions were for entertainment value really. Dredge and use tugs wasn't very exciting.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26622120.

So was the reason the ship became stuck because it was drawing a penis shape in its course path? Or was it getting stuck unrelated?

It's worth looking at the discussion of the ship just three days ago on Hacker News[1]. A lot of what people thought was true (that it would be stuck there for weeks, being dismissive of using tugboats to pull it out) didn't pan out as expected. Just a reminder that we should always take what we read with a grain of salt, and that it's fine to reserve judgement and see what will actually happen after the initial media storm passes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282

Also, if we’re being honest, a pack of software nerds on a website don’t have the deep expertise on every topic like they think they do (speaking as a software nerd on a website myself :)).

The stuff that gets posted here sometimes is...fascinating.

To be fair, there were a number of people chiming in who were claiming to be experienced in that area (ex Navy captains, people who did dredging ops, etc). One of the big things that changed the timeline was that the highest tide of the month occurred yesterday; if not, I imagine that ship would be stuck for another month!

Being expert in adjacent domains is sometimes worse than being clueless. The ratio of actual to assumed expertise seems to get worse. Navy captains vs shipping boats, geologists vs climate scientists, programmers vs cpu design, etc etc. You can very easily not understand subtleties, comment on a thing, and then people listen to you.

>programmers vs cpu design

You went a bit too far. I'd presume a lot of programmers do know CPU architecture well. While not common some of them to work on boring web platforms, some still do. Also most CPU architects would be decent programmers to begin with.

Programming has not changed all that much and it was not so long time ago that programmers routinely knew assembly and how many cycles (and bytes) each opcode took... Nowadays it might be regarded as an arcane art by most, of course.

In all of those examples, its possible the person DOES have a good understanding of the adjacent domain. And in all examples, it is possible they will miss some subtleties, but people will give their opinions a lot of weight.

Just as an example I see a lot: branch prediction. Some programmers don't know about it at all. Many do know about it, but think that it still works in some form like "assume the branch will go the same way it did last time". Which is how it worked in the 1990s. Then it evolved, and then it evolved two more times. Today there is something like a neural network that learns how the branches will go. (And careful, im a programmer so I may be communicating some subtleties wrong there!)

>Today there is something like a neural network that learns how the branches will go.

More like history, where the call comes from. Oddly enough the price of branch misdirection has become lower as not the entire pipeline needs to be thrown away but also due to hyper threading taking the slack.

Flip note: with 'recent' developments of Spectre, one'd think branch prediction got into the lime light. Truth be told, though, not many would be able to write constant time 'fizz buzz' (can try it on your own, bonus points to having constant time int->string conversion)

> Programming has not changed all that much and it was not so long time ago that programmers routinely knew assembly and how many cycles (and bytes) each opcode took...

That statement partly highlights the problem. It assumes linear execution, when in reality, for most performance-critical products, out-of-order execution is the reality. For example: https://smist08.wordpress.com/2019/11/15/out-of-order-instru...

Most programmers on Apple platforms don't actually think about execution order -- because they don't have to -- but also because Apple is actively using Clang to discourage assembly and writing for specific CPU architectures. It makes Apple's job of releasing new silicon that much easier if they don't have to worry about breaking existing software custom written for a previous architecture.

And this still assumes a one-to-one relationship between the code you're writing and the computer it's running on or designed for. When you get to the cloud, or cloud functions, that breaks down even further. If using Heroku, for example, you don't even have to consider how to deploy your code and you can make it pretty far running a production service.

It's possible for closely related fields to still have very large differences. Consider drivers and cars: The more automation is introduced, the less we might need to know about what the automation is doing for us under the hood. Anti-Lock Breaking (ABS) in cars might be a simple example where folks know about it because there's a light on the dash and instructions in driver's ed. But if we didn't have those indicators, how often would anyone know about it and other such features? Some technologies remain undocumented until discovered later by experimentation, the VW diesels come to mind. Specific chip designers likely know more than your average programmer, just as specific car manufacturers likely know more about their products than drivers would.

> It assumes linear execution, when in reality

This is quite a blatant assumption on its right own (and very far from the truth). The programming, itself, has not changed. But of course, modern hardware is not a von neumann machine. Writing lock-free datastructure is not that different programming, it requires a lot more attention and (possibly) experience but the basic premise is still the same.

Understanding memory topology/hierarchy & latency, concurrency, branch (mis)prediction, cache coherency should be a minimum for anyone who comments on CPU architecture. I did mention Assembly and without some knowledge on the target architecture it's rather pointless to comment on, either.

I encourage most developers to at least understand that memory is not actually 'random access', which makes derefernce not cheap - but accessing data placed together is next to free as it is likely to hit L1.

> discourage assembly and writing for specific CPU architecture

I found out that I could not reliably beat a standard compiler writing everyday Assembly around K6-2 years. Yet, still some inner loops can be carefully hand optimized. The point is that there are plenty of programmers who would be able to understand modern architecture and to me basic understanding is needed unless the job is just gluing code.

And the aging of their experience matters. I mentioned upthread that I was trained as a merchant marine officer. However that was three decades ago and while a lot of my training will still apply, industry practices move on and a lot of the stuff I learned is long since outdated. A lot of times I start to type a reply to something relevant and have to smack myself into remembering that things are probably done differently in 2021 :-)

It took them a few days to dredge away meters of sand. Why would it take more than a few additional days to dredge away another couple meters of sand?

Of course each meter of depth is a little harder, but not that much harder.

>Of course each meter of depth is a little harder, but not that much harder.

lol - cut and fill on a slope is not trivial. It’s more of an exponential function than a linear one for the amount of material removed the deeper you have to go down. They dodged a HUGE bullet with the highest tides happening this weekend. If they had gone beyond a Tuesday with the drop in tides each day as the moon got further away it would have been sketchy if they could have gotten ahead of the tide or not.

The timing of this couldn’t have been tighter. Thankfully they came out on the good side :)

The seasonal variation in the tides is like 20 centimeters. The draft of the ship is more than 10 meters at the bow.

Good thing we are talking normal monthly tidal variations (not seasonal) which vary by meters, not centimeters.

Not in Suez though.

Yes, the high tide is a better opportunity to do it, the tides over the next couple of weeks are still within 20-30 cm. The worst day in the next 30 days is 60 cm below the highest.

But maybe the dredge only made a few centimeters of difference running for 5 days, who knows.

Yeah, but on ship this size 400x60x0.2=4800 tons of difference! I'm somewhat exaggerating because ship hull isn't cuboid, but it is still likely equivalent to removing around hundred containers.

Only a portion of it was grounded, not the full length of the ship.

Someone linked a BBC article stating that they shifted 27,000 cubic meters of sand, so there you go, they could likely remove a meter under the whole thing in a similar amount of time (probably longer to cover area instead of digging down, but that isn't what they would need to do).

Yes - Mother Nature deserves the lions share of credit for extraditing the ship!

As someone who watches a few too many YouTube videos on all things space, I consider myself to be a leading cosmologist, astrophysicist, and rocket scientist. I can speak w/ great confidence to anyone who knows nothing about these subjects.

> I can speak w/ great confidence to anyone who knows nothing about these subjects.

heh sorry, can't tell how serious you're being. but it tickles my brain that there's someone who would also vibe with that byline: con artists :)

I'm being serious if you know nothing about space :)

Did you know my experimental observations of quantum gravity & string theory are as good, if not better, than the world's top scientists? If you print this comment on paper, I will have been published & peer reviewed, too!

I see your tongue is still firmly in cheek here, as a brief Google Scholar search would reveal there are very few experiments available to observe quantum gravity and as far as I can tell, few studies of mathematics ever bother considering the experimental observations that other scientists or engineers would require. In fact, another researcher wrote the following article in 2017 in plain language: https://nautil.us/issue/45/power/what-quantum-gravity-needs-... therefore what you're saying is roughly true if not exactly true? ;-)

From that 2017 article:

> You already know we haven’t found anything yet—otherwise you’d have heard of it. But even null results are valuable guides for theory development. They teach us that some ideas—for example, that spacetime might be a regular lattice—are simply incompatible with observations.

I would suggest that publishing and peer review requires an audience, therefore ... err, by publishing this I am actually peer-reviewing your work?! Drat! That makes me 0/2 then!

To conclude my peer-review, I would like to see more details for reproduction, merely stating that you've performed experiments without providing the necessary observational data and steps to reproduce highlights the lack of originality in the paper you're proposing and therefore I would decline to publish. ;-)

Ever since I discovered n-gate.com HN comments read a little different than they used to...

Do tell?

This is some kind of weekly digest? I don't fully get it.

Never mind!

Here

https://www.patreon.com/ngate

There's an offer of:

Limited Series A (5 remaining) just €43.50 (+VAT) per month

Limited Series B (7 remaining) just €431.50 (+VAT) per month

Limited Series C (1 remaining) just €862.50 (+VAT) per month

Brilliant!

(I must note that the circuit shown there is... somehow... inducing some negativity in me.... which probably isn't unintentional.)

And the main site has an about page too, in all its glory:

http://n-gate.com/about/

It's a weekly digest that makes fun of how absolutely full of shit (and themselves) HN posters are.

Yes, been following n-gate along with HN for years now .. n-gate gives a whole new perspective on HN comments and casts a light on dangers of taking an echo chamber too seriously ..

Wow thanks for the link. That is too funny, a little.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is real

Well the biggest luck event in this case, is that there was a dredger pretty close to the ship. If you dont have a dredger and you need to ship one there we would have wait much more time

Knowing nothing about it, would it be safe to assume that the Suez Canal would always have a dredger around? Or is that not how that works?

I assume it's the same kind of luck that places gas stations near motorways.

Yeah, they have dredgers around for maintenance of the canal. This clip was from at least 6 months ago. https://youtu.be/P6st0k7KJmk

From the YouTube clip, it def seems like it's normal to see them when passing through the canal.

The media seems to exaggerate problems...

Why do you say that? What was true is that if they couldn't get it out during the period surrounding king tide (which is now, peaking next high tide) then it would be a few weeks before conditions were as good.

That's a factual take on things.

Note that the egyptians were also planning for the "maybe weeks" scenerio. They were assembling the team for a litering operation (cranes etc) should the ship need to be partially unloaded. And a great many ships began to divert around africa, some of which may now be turning around. Certainly the shipping industry as a whole was headging against the "maybe weeks" option.

Not everyone on HN is a software nerd. More than a few here have worked in the shipping and logistics industries.

> Note that the egyptians were also planning for the "maybe weeks" scenerio.

Which is the sensible thing to do in their position: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

The canal has a limited capacity, so the backlog may go on for few weeks anyway.

They've said they expect to clear it in 3-4 days.

The HN crowd tends to be heavily bearish on pretty much everything here, and there's an ironic lack of respect for experts in fields beyond those few HN favorite topics (e.g., low-level programming languages).

So, the difference in the expected outcome here doesn't surprise me.

Tesla and SpaceX?

HN tends to be pretty bearish on Tesla, although overall bullish on SpaceX.

Yeah, but sitting around and reserving judgement wouldn't make for a very interesting comment section. :)

We got lucky. But several weeks was real scenario. If this boat would leak, ruptured, broke in half...

I think most people were reserving judgement.

But judgement reservers aren't prone to jump on message boards and shout "guess we'll have to wait and see" to the world.

> A lot of what people thought was true (that it would be stuck there for weeks, being dismissive of using tugboats to pull it out) didn't pan out as expected.

That was what many investors thought - see crude oil market in last days. There were two tribes - one saying week and second month(s) to solve the problem with ship. One selling, because of optimistic perspective and obviously other buying for opposite reason. In the result the price was standing still on the "same" level.

This happens a lot on HN. Another recent example which turned out to be dead wrong about Coinbase[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459556

Those comments were really helpful to me. HM did a great job at showing just how insanely large this ship is and why it will be difficult to get it unstuck. To a layman such as myself, a boat remaining stuck for almost an entire week sounds pretty absurd without that context.

To the tinfoil layman it’s funny, if I am not mistaken, that as soon as the President of Egypt ordered it to be unloaded they suddenly got it unstuck within the next 24 hours.

To be fair: Maersk, biggest shipping company in the world also came to the conclusion that it will take longer and sent their ships the way around africa. It's always a gamble and every outcome has it's probabilities.

that may still be the right choice given that now there is a huge backlog

Yes - just because they moved it that doesn’t mean the delays instantly clear.

I think this is wrong.

Someone says "it COULD be stuck for weeks"

It gets unstuck earlier, fine. Doesn't invalidate the possibility.

The criticism is moot. If anyone had made bets, then I'd take both more seriously.

We see this all the time with political polling.

"Oh, Nate Silver said Trump only had a 30% chance of winning the election, but he did, so Nate Silver is an idiot!"

Nate Silver wasn’t just a little off - he was massively off outside of accepted norms for polling.

Multiple times no less.

No, he really wasn't. In 2016 he was one of the most optimistic of the major poll aggregators on Trump's chances; he had Trump at 30% when others had him at much lower odds.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav...

> Our final forecast, issued early Tuesday evening, had Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.1 By comparison, other models tracked by The New York Times put Trump’s odds at: 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent and less than 1 percent.

As for 2020:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-werent-great-...

> This year was definitely a little weird, given that the vote share margins were often fairly far off from the polls (including in some high-profile examples such as Wisconsin and Florida). But at the same time, a high percentage of states (likely 48 out of 50) were “called” correctly, as was the overall Electoral College and popular vote winner (Biden). And that’s usually how polls are judged: Did they identify the right winner?

(He also doesn't do the polling. He's an analyst, not a pollster.)

Lol - quoting himself to back up his performance?

How about linking to others and not him defending his performance. Of course he’s going to have excuses.

Live a little and maybe even pick sources that might not align politically with you too for an alternate POV. Prevents “surprises”. Because as someone with no love lost on either party the election results were not a surprise - you just have to look across all sources, not just the ones that tell you what you want to hear.

You're most welcome to "link to others" so we can discuss their specific critiques.

The "aggregate the polls" approach appears to have called 48/50 races correctly, so I'm fairly comfortable with it.

When this first got posted on HN I felt confident that I had absolutely no clue about the difficulties involved or how best to resolve the situation. I still stand by that assessment.

I think a lot of that is because of this one quote and how the news (and the public) handled it (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/24/ever-given-a-massive-cargo-s...):

> "We can't exclude it might take weeks, depending on the situation," said Peter Berdowski, CEO of Dutch company Boskalis.

Of course that message got oversimplified as it spread. "Can't exclude" is a pretty important qualifier that suggests that it's an unlikely worst case.

But that nuance already was lost in the title of that same article: "Cargo ship blocking Suez Canal could take weeks to move". If you were to read only that title, you might think it is likely to take weeks.

TLDR: People thought it would take weeks because that's what they were hearing from other people.

On the other hand, they hired the best salvage company in the world to remove the ship, that company ran massive calculations on the loads in the ship, and then they determined the application of forces needed to dislodge the boat.

I think the pendulum is swinging too far the other direction. "Look how easy it is. They just shook it loose" is the wrong lesson to take here, IMO.

“ Oil prices remained volatile, however, amid concerns to the time it may take to clear the almost 500 ship backlog and expectations that OPEC members will hold their production cut agreement in place following their monthly meeting in Vienna later this week.” Such a perfect time for Democrats to play politics with energy. Wheee! Everyone get ready to bend over.

I mean...the largest increase, and the longest year-to-year increase of gas prices in the past 30 years happened 2002-2008, which was hardly Democrat controlled. Prior to that they were basically flat since 1990. The past two presidents saw an increase the first half of their years in office (4 years for Obama, 2 years for Trump), and a drop the last half.

Not really sure a political conclusion is warranted here.

Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26621850.

Funny how all the HN armchair experts kept telling everyone that the difficulty of this is vastly underestimated, and how people don’t understand “scale”.

That's not true. $58B worth of goods were delayed for a few days. That definitely didn't cost anything even remotely that much.

Whenever you see such absurdly high numbers attached to cost estimates, always try to understand how they calculate it.

This took the "$400 million / hour of shipped goods are being delayed" figure and ran with it by multiplying it, claiming that's the total damage cost.

Now ask yourself: Let's say you're sending a parcel via UPS that contains an iphone, or simply $1000 worth of goods. At the last stopping point of the UPS truck, they get a flat tire before being able to deliver it. Your iphone delivery is unexpectedly delayed for a day.

How much damage has been caused? What if it's two days? Six days?

There's just a big fat "this isn't how it works" attached to this $58bn figure.

Edit: For context since parent comment was deleted, this refers to istheshipstillstuck.com's estimate of $58bn worth of damages being caused by the ship being stuck.

Delivery to end customers is not equivalent to delivery as part of a supply chain. Instead of $1K of iPhones, think of it as $1Mn worth of components for a manufacturing process or items to be placed on a shelf. Many of those items' shipping timeframes are well-known and factored into calculations of supply and demand. If a customer wants to buy something from you and you're out of stock, they're generally not going to sit on their hands and wait patiently, they're going to buy from your competitors or not at all. That money is gone.

Also, consider that we're at the end of a financial quarter, and this could also account for missed targets for all manner of industry.

So what you're saying is, "it's complicated"?

Quite, but I'm also saying that your analogy was terminally flawed. Supply chain shipping != shipping your widget from Amazon.

Wasn't supposed to be an analogy but rather a simplification of the fact that delayed goods do not translate 1:1 to losses.

It’s not Just complicated but a ton of math has been used for the last fifty years to make it as cheap as possible at the cost of robustness. Removing stacks of supplies at factories and ware houses in favor of just in time deliveries. Consolidating redundant factories. That sort of thing. I am not in logistics but I worked I a factory as an intern with the operations research group in the 1980s.

You've just gone up a level to draw the boundary at the wrong place. That money isn't "gone", because as you've said, the customer simply buys from a competitor.

This is going to be bad for some individual businesses (imagine a small business buying a whole container of perishable goods), but systemically it's a blip. Delays are not destruction. Failure to make something is not the same as spending resources to make it only to have it destroyed.

Money shifted around to different winners, but very little damage occurred.

One impact I read about was that Egypt makes ~$300K per ship in tolls, which they won't make if ships take the long route around Africa instead.

or, they’re gonna make more money with the “rush hour” that will follow and they will only lose a small fraction of what people think they’re gonna lose

A part will also be lower profits > lower stock prices.

That's too bad. Now the hysterical media will have to find something else to get worked up about.

Oh, this was actually a fun disaster compared to almost anything else!

If only we could live in a world where the worst international news story is a big boat being temporarily stuck with people making silly memes about it.

It's not that it wasn't fun. It's that the media goes into absurd hyperbole on every subject.

This boat was going to be stuck for weeks, and maybe forever!

...and now they'll shift to absurd hyperbole on some other topic that is potentially more damaging.

The company tasked to salvage the ship said that they will use dredgers and tugs and will try to pull the ship free. They also said that if that doesn't work they will have to lighten the ship, which can take weeks.

After that it was entirely fair and true to report that "it might take weeks to get the ship unstuck." Just because we got lucky and the simpler, faster, plan worked doesn't make such reporting hyperbolic.

The company said they could have it out within days, or it could take weeks. So what do media organizations report?

"Suez Canal could be blocked for weeks."

Always err on the side of hyperbole and extreme negativity.

I, for one, was thankful that we had something relatively non-polarizing in the news to discuss. "Stuck boat needs to get unstuck" is the kind of practical problem that people on both sides of the fence can agree on :)

My local newspaper's comments has people who think the boat's name is Evergreen, not Ever Given ("haha stupid media can't even get that right") and that it's a reference to Hillary Clinton's Secret Service code name and that Means Something™. (https://imgur.com/a/1CjsCsl)

Nothing's non-polarizing anymore.

The word "EVERGREEN" is painted on the side of the boat about 400 feet long and maybe 60 feet tall. I think it's fair to misinterpret that as the name of the boat, and not the name of the company that owns the boat. Especially so because the two names are so similar.

It's fair to be confused over the name a little.

It's a bit less fair to think it's Hillary Clinton's Secret Service codeword painted on the side of the ship to advertise child trafficking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com