Is that ship still stuck? | Hacker News Reader

Is that ship still stuck?

istheshipstillstuck.com

1,453 pointsColinWright1,237 comments

I don't think people are giving enough credit to how stuck the ship is.

Look at some of the photos of the front of it. Look at how far out of the water it is sitting. The ship might look like that if it were totally empty, but not when it is full of containers like this.

Some people saying: just drag it off of the sand. Okay! And what happens when that causes you to rip a hole into the hull of the ship? Now it's really stuck.

Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship. You're basically asking to build a port in the middle of the egyptian desert. That isn't going to happen.

It's really stuck. It's probably going to take a couple of weeks to get it unstuck.

> Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship.

It seems, though, that a partial unloading is being considered by a professional in the field according to quotes in an article in The Guardian [1]:

However, Peter Berdowski, CEO of Boskalis, a specialist dredging company that has sent a crew to the scene, said data so far suggested “it is not really possible to pull it loose” and that the ship may need to be unloaded. “We can’t exclude it might take weeks, depending on the situation,” Berdowski told Dutch television.

He said the ship’s bow and stern had been lifted up against either side of the canal. “It’s like an enormous beached whale. It’s an enormous weight on the sand. We might have to work with a combination of reducing the weight by removing containers, oil and water from the ship, tugboats and dredging of sand.”

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/25/suez-canal-blo...

This is a really good example of how terrible people are at judging scale. Some numbers getting thrown around downthread say there's something to the tune of 10,000 40ft containers. To give a bit of a sense of perspective, that's like trying to clear out some 200 football fields worth of semi-trucks, except they are stacked, packed full of stuff, and have no gas or wheels. And all of them are perched atop a ship that is twice as tall and there's no suitable cranes or similar equipment anywhere near the vicinity.

If you ever seen a truck up close, you probably have an idea how tricky it is to maneuver even a single functional one on open flat ground. I can't even begin to imagine what it would take to move off even a fraction of 10,000 equivalents of bricks of the size of trucks, let alone budge the massive ship off of the sand banks.

Could you build a temporary barrier around the ship and the section of the canal, bring in some massive pumps, and temporarily raise the water level around the ship?

Edit: Something like this https://www.hydrologicalsolutions.com/aqua-barrier-cofferdam...

> Look at some of the photos of the front of it. Look at how far out of the water it is sitting. The ship might look like that if it were totally empty, but not when it is full of containers like this.

One thing many people are missing is the Suez Canal is not concrete, it’s sand, so the canal “walls” are not vertical they’re a relatively gentle 3:1 slope (4:1 in wider areas). Meaning only the center half of the canal is flat and “at depth”, the ship started hitting sand 30-40m from the edge of the canal. By the time it reached the visible edge it’s half-sitting on sand half wedged into it.

>Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship. You're basically asking to build a port in the middle of the egyptian desert. That isn't going to happen.

I say build a trebuchet on deck and start launching containers into the desert.

As this thread turned into 'post your crazy idea and get told why it would not work' here is my take: use powerful water pumps and direct streams of water to flush out the sand in spots where the ship rests on it and also around the bow.

Something like that, but redirected under the ship: https://youtu.be/BIoBGZLc7wM?t=184

If you unload 20,000 TEU's onto rail cars it takes 5000 cars, double-stacked. That's 50 100-car trains. It'll take weeks to months to load and unload all that, if a proper rail depot is available to take it. It takes huge cranes to reach across a megaship and into its hold. That'd have to be build. On sand.

The idea that there's any quick way to manage the cargo of this ship is whistling in the dark.

The pictures I've seen completely hide the ship's bulbous bow. It juts out seemingly like 50 feet from the front of the bow that you can see. It looks like all of that is wedged in the sand

I wonder, could you liquify the soil around the buried part of the ship by pumping air into the surrounding areas? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_liquefaction

Only about the center third of the channel is actually deep enough for this massive ship. Both ends of the ship is stuck in several meters of sand. So far they've only managed get two bulldozers on to try and dig it out but progress is slow.

Exactly. I'm guessing weeks rather than days, and maybe more than that.

The best I can come up with is heavy lift helicopters to at least remove the front most containers to relieve some of the pressure but even that would be an enormous operation.

Anything else would require major construction especially if it is to reach more than just the first four or five rows which is likely not going to be enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-26

Can do up to 60 tons total weight for a bit. That should cover even the heaviest containers. At least, I hope it does, if not they're royally screwed.

Weeks are measured in what I'd call, a lot of money. Is it a consolidation of funds sort of issue? Anybody responsible for getting it fixed?

Unloading is feasible, it would just take a couple of weeks. They just need a floating crane on each side and some barges to take the containers away.

Don't worry, there's a guy digging it out :)

https://twitter.com/SuezDiggerGuy

The most impressive thing to me, reading this comment thread, is all the ways the situation could get worse.

Depending on the design and bulk heads ripping a hole in the hull can be an option. My father was a naval architect and did some work re-floating container ships and I know they did this on at least one occasion and got the ship up the west coast of Africa, past Spain and Portugal, and through the English Channel. They would have stopped earlier but the ship yards en route jacked up their prices because they assumed there was no other choice.

The interesting thing for me is going to be where that ship goes if they manage to re-float it.

If it is any indication, other ships are turning around and betting on the two weeks journey around Africa.

Helicopters are a thing.

And yeah, even completely empty with no fuel or ballast you will never see the bow out of the water like that. However it is more than capable of surviving being dragged along sand. It's just that they have nothing strong enough to drag it with.

Eventually someone will stake some anchors into the ground and use an industrial winch, but that's where hull design starts to suck - there's no good anchor points by which to pull it, so there'll need to be a large number of straps cradling the hull that are being pulled.

Is there a chance the ship could tip over in some type of manouver, considering it's stuck both at the front and the back?

I think you just need a smaller crane ship to transfer the cargo e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliary_crane_ship

"Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship."

I would guess someone could figure out how to use a normal-ish crane to unload some of the containers and set them down in the sand. The top containers look like they are maybe 150 feet or so higher than ground level.

Ok, since everyone is sharing their solutions, and nobody named the most obvious one, I'll do it: just nuke it from orbit.

How about creating a mini-dam surrounding the vessel and raising the water level so it can turn.

Or stopping the current at 90% of the ship and letting it push to the front ( if it's in the right direction), perhaps in combination with gigantic sails ( if there's enough wind) and/or sucking sand/mud from the bottom.

They need to give that canal some serious laxatives to flush that ship out. ;-]

But seriously, it looks like dredging or a king tide will be needed to get that ship flushed out of there.

Btw, it takes roughly 9-10 additional days to navigate a ship around the horn so ships would be better off steaming the long way around if time is critical.

The economic fallout will be big and it gets worse day by day. And we weren't exactly in the best shape to begin with...

Suez canal seems to be a Single Point of Failure.

Lloyd's List estimated that every day Suez is closed costs US$9 billion ($400 million per hour).

If it could be done technically and open up the canal, it would be cheaper for insurance companies to buy the ship, it's cargo, buy all nearby property and then blow the whole ship up.

People think I'm joking but we should bomb it to smithereens. The crater would probably just fill up with the water flow.

> Look at some of the photos of the front of it. Look at how far out of the water it is sitting.

I'm curious how much of this is hightide vs low. If the photo is taken at low tide you have about 1.7m drop on the stern which is going to make it look far more stuck. While if the photo is at high tide, wow.

> And what happens when that causes you to rip a hole into the hull of the ship?

I cant see sand friction ripping a hole in the steel unless there are rocks in the mix. I think the bigger risk is cracking the hull if there is too much weight at the front vs displacing this across the entire hull.

> I don't think you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship.

To this, while absolutely it huge infrastructure Im assuming they only intends to reduce weight, not unload. So some crane choppers or whatever can make a big difference taking off 5% of containers type thing. I even wonder if they want to keep the back loaded to effectively life the front... but that might exacerbate the risk of hull breakage?

> It's really stuck. It's probably going to take a couple of weeks to get it unstuck.

My armchair engineering would dump a load of salt into the water to increase buoyancy of the ship long enough for the tugs to get some momentum with less effort than currently.

That would be my cheap try solution to help the tugs that have already hit there limit so why not change the physics and add a load of salt.

You could unload it using crane ships, and just leave the containers in heaps on the bank of the river, but it could take weeks because that thing is filled to the brink. Any way you look at it there's not an easy solution in sight.

Agreed.

Though, to be fair, even the CEO of Flexport initially dismissed this, saying "I assume they'll have it fixed in a day or two. And anyways there's such a backlog of ships waiting to unload at the ports of arrival that it probably won't even impact the transit times of the cargo." https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1374501965418352640

Unloading it may be exactly what happens (based on comments from the Dutch salvage company brought in to deal with the mess). And yeah, it's going to take weeks (best case scenario).

I'm not familiar with shipping, but I would guess there are some type of crane ships which could be dispatched along with barges to slowly offload some of the container. Obviously it is going to take some time mustering all these specialized craft and specialists on location.

What's with the many joucular/tounge-in-cheek posts on this thread..

In an emergency situation like this: could they not use helicopters to lift containers off of the ship and just stack them next to the canal until they've freed the ship?

Seems pretty quick to setup and do assuming there are helicopters that can move that weight.

Can’t we just dig a new canal?

Crazy idea : Can we roll it into the water by pulling it over high strength rollers of some sort ? It would be pretty cool to use the same technique that was use to build the pyramids.

Apparently it wasn’t that hard after all. HackerNews people are not shipping experts.

But naively, I’d think you just need to apply the opposite force to the force that got it stuck. Surely that didn’t break the hull.

Not saying it can work in this scenario, but I think salvagers have used pneumatic devices to float and or manoeuver derelict ships.

>Some people saying: just drag it off of the sand. Okay! And what happens when that causes you to rip a hole into the hull of the ship? Now it's really stuck.

Not just that, but don't forget the inertia. The moment the ship gets unstuck the force needed to get it moving, multiplied with the ship's huge mass would create such a huge momentum that it would be very hard to stop it from hitting the other shore with the stern.

Couldn't we just place dynamite near the front and use the explosion to push the ship off the sand/rocks and back into the water?

...

> It's probably going to take a couple of weeks to get it unstuck.

You're an optimist, that's for sure.

Seems like the risk assessment wasn't good if hitting the bank results in this kind of outcome.

It is really pretty amazing that this hasn't happened with more frequency in the past.

Dumb question but what about heavy lift helicopters moving containers off 1 by 1?

There are helicopters that I think can be used for (un)loading containers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_S-64_Skycrane

Oh look! Everyone in these comments was way off. They dredged some sand and dragged it off - after days, not weeks.

I now wonder how regularly Gell-Mann Amnesia occurs for people on HN, really.

Love the armchair engineers who think they're gonna solve this better than billion dollar companies

Why not just CUT IT APART and clean up the mess after?

Like this: https://jalopnik.com/a-chain-just-cut-through-a-capsized-car...

>You're basically asking to build a port in the middle of the egyptian desert.

No. Helicopters. 10 helis, 1 container/sortie, 10 sorties/hour = 10000 containers in 5 days.

This ship thing is a perfect metaphor for the current US government.

Military does it all the time with helicopters. Not cheap or easy but probably the most likely outcome

Dumb question: How about evacuating and then blowing up the ship?

Yes, the loss of the ship and all its cargo will be immense, but that seems to be dwarfed by the damage the blocked canal causes.

Fun facts:

1. The owner is Japanese

2. The operator is Taiwanese

3. The flag is Panamanian

4. The cargo is Chinese

5. The insurer is British

6. The crew is Indian

7. The canal is Egyptian and was built with forced labor by the French

8. The dredgers/salvage op managers are Dutch

9. The destination is the Netherlands (Rotterdam).

While we're at it, the 1956 Suez canal crisis marked the end of the traditional colonial powers when the USSR threatened to nuke London and Paris if they don't let Egypt regain control of the canal.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/yes-1956-suez-crisi...

Go, go gadget globalisation!

Seriously though that's pretty amazing.

Fun fact: corporations used to exist for a limit period of time, to solve a particular problem, and were then dissolved. With the introduction of indefinite corporations, we end up with cool setups like those /u/throwawaybutwhy has highlighted.

> The flag is Panamanian

That's an interesting way to say tax evasion.

Pretty much summed up the current world order...

9. Everybody is fucked

It will be weeks before this ship is free.

Fuel and oil can be pumped out but that only makes up a fraction of the total weight of the vessel. Containers can be unloaded but again the lightest will be at the top so a significant number will need to be removed to make a big enough difference. And unloading them will be a slow process. You can maybe unload a few per hour with helicopters. There doesn't exist any infrastructure which could get to that location and lift off containers. You could build a custom crane barge but that would take at least a month to fabricate and get to the site. The easiest way to remove containers will be using cutting equipment, winches and possibly explosives. It won't be easy and will likely take several weeks to unload a significant number of containers, the ship and containers will be damaged in the process.

That leaves dredging the sand under the ship. Again the infrastructure to do this rapidly doesn't exist. You can dig out the sand around the ship but there is a huge amount that the ship is resting on. It will take specialist dredging equipment to start removing this sand.

Could you replace dredging with just a whole lot of flowing water? Pump water under the hull, let the sand turn into mud, have the weight of the ship push the mud to the side. As the ship gets lower and lower, less of its weight becomes supported by the sand.

The mud would still flow to the sides. You might wanna do some dredging over there to give the mud somewhere to go, and make more manouvring space. But in any case, this way you can move a whole lot of sand with very basic equipment. You can't move it far, or move it "up" but you can move it.

How about sectioning off a part of the canal around the ship and pumping water in?

> Again the infrastructure to do this rapidly doesn't exist.

The UAE used several sand-vacuuming ships to build their artificial islands, wouldn't those do the job?

They may have a shot Mar 30th - there's a high tide coming.

Should we also count the effort needed to put these containers back to vessel? Same for fuel.

The excavators make sense as the first stage of a dredging operation.

How about doing nothing? Just let the canal be blocked. Go the long way. All about the journey not thw destination. Give the container owners an NFT of their missing container.

Why not roll the containers off the ship - like a stone block of a pyramid? "All you need" is a ramp (or a hole in the side).

Principle of maximal irony prediction: the ship rolls over while trying to free it and the suez gets littered with containers, takes even longer to clear it.

The Dutch national news had an interview with the CEO of Boskalis, which is the company hired to unlodge the ship. They have one team on the ground atm and another building computer simulations exactly to calculate how much oil and ballast they can pump out (to lighten the ship up and make it easier to tow) without endangering the stability of the ship.

Apparently they had a similar case (same size of ship) a few years back on the Elbe in Germany, in the end it took 12 (!) of the largest tugs they had to get it loose.

A bit off topic, but anyone who ever played SnowRunner or MudRunner can probably relate. Quite often when you try to rescue a truck, you flip it over, and now require another truck with a crane to come over and load the cargo again.

One missing part of the discussion is how this large ship got stuck. Brenden Greely of The Financial Times had a good possible take the other day on the Bank Effect:

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

Essentially, Bernoulli's Principle makes these large ships susceptible to jack-knifing in narrow canals.

Faster moving water creates a lower pressure zone. Water moves fastest near the stern of the boat. This is why the bow will tend to rise when a ship is moving quickly; the stern can bee seen as being sucked down almost.

In the Suez the 24m deep bed of the canal makes the water move very fast near the stern of the ship. This will also occur near the banks of the canal. With these very large ships, the effect is more pronounced, as there is less cross-sectional area for the water to move past.

If a ship gets near the banks, then you'll get the fast low pressure water acting on the bank-side of the stern and the bottom. Add your force vectors up, the ship torques, and does a 'wheelie' off the bank, jack-knifing the canal.

The big problem here is that these superships all are susceptible to this. It's a matter of hydrodynamics. The bigger the ship, the worse it gets. Meaning that economics comes crashing into physics, and we all know who will win that fight.

> It has cost us $30 billion dollars, so far...

This valuation is based on Lloyd's list's valuation of Suez traffic at ~$10 billion / day, but surely that would require all traffic to be permanently lost (rather than delayed) to add up to a concrete loss. Spoilage might be an issue with some cargo, plus there's other costs to delay, but I can't imagine the eventual loss will be anything close to $10 billion / day (excepting obvious large unknowns like market speculation).

A bit off-topic but I think worth noting. The VesselFinder map on this website is incredibly smooth and responsive! Every time I open up Google Maps, I feel how bloated it is despite running on the Pixel 5, Google's very own latest flagship device! It seems to me Google doesn't care much about Maps' performance if I feel more comfortable navigating maps using some random, web embed. After looking around the embed a bit, turns out it's powered by OSM! Even though I have never used OSM before, I should have guessed. Truly nice work on this OSM and VesselFinder. It's honestly euphoric to find software which performs so well despite not having access to billions of dollars in resources.

It's using OpenLayers.

https://openlayers.org/

Reading through the comments where people come up with solutions, really shows to me that software engineering education is lacking in terms of teaching general engineering principles.

Some of these proposals can be seen as being completely off reality by some basic order of magnitude estimations. Which is something that should be front and center of every engineering education.

> really shows to me that software engineering education is lacking in terms of teaching general engineering principles

Correct me if I’m wrong but Hacker News isn’t comprised solely of software engineers.

Quite the arrogance here of mostly software devs trying to out -solutionize marine/shipping experts who undoubtedly have been consulted and are already looking for the quickest way to resolve the situation. With billions of dollars in stake, I'm sure even the most expensive experts are involved.

Maybe people just find it to be an interesting problem and are having fun thinking out loud about it.

Looks to me like everyone here is just having fun theorizing about it, I don’t see much, if any, real arrogance.

I'm not sure it's arrogance. I'm reading these theories and suggestions as a fun thought experiment. I also like comparing the real solution, whatever it is, with my memory of the arm-chair solutions to see how far off the mark they are.

Better than the coronavirus takes I've seen from software devs...

... but I think we've also identified a market for a Poly Bridge style game where you try to unstuck a containers ship from the canal in increasingly absurd ways.

I think the people chatting would have to be involved in some way for amateur theories to be problematic.

Yeah they flew in a 10 man team from Netherlands pretty much immediately

Bikeshedding can look like that sometimes.

No need to leave a comment then.

Kind of like geohot fixing covid

Kubernetes memes we got out of this are pure gold though.

It’s damn fun and I’m looking forward to the n-gate analysis of this thread. In the mean time nuke that ship! Or more seriously what creating a parallel canal around that but for now. With dynamite.

We're kind of like physicists: https://xkcd.com/793/

Is it totally implausible that ordinary intelligent people might have some ideas better than "put some tug boats on one end, and a single backhoe on the other end"? Because that's what your expensive experts have come up with so far.

For my brilliant idea: Announce that everything on the ship is free, including the ship itself, and watch all the ragamuffins of Egypt strip it to nothing in a day.

Site author here, I guess this is why the New York Times API keeps hitting rate limits.

Interesting project. WOndering if you could write a blog about building that site.

Cool! How much traffic are you handling at the moment / at peak?

I suppose I'll kick off the usual "why don't they just do X" thread.

It seems to me that if they can't move it by any normal means, they could just start pushing cargo containers overboard and fish them out until it's light enough to move.

I could also a lot of plausible reasons why they wouldn't do that:

- it wouldn't work (no equipment to move containers)

- the ship's owner doesn't want to do that and no one has the authority to force them

- the ship's owner wants to do that, but the owner of the cargo doesn't want them to

- the cost of lost cargo is more than the cost of delaying other ships

- it would take too long or be too messy to clean up

The carrier can announce a general average [1] which allows it to throw the containers overboard if they believe it will help the ship get moving.

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

Perhaps most importantly: the channel is only a couple dozen meters deep, which is part of the problem. Dropping a bunch of containers down there would almost certainly create a new obstacle for this and other ships

> they could just start pushing cargo containers overboard and fish them out until it's light enough to move

Light boats are less stable. One of the few that could make this situation worse would be the damn thing capsizing.

Just another non-expert, but I wonder if the simplest approach might be to pump water under it to wash away the sand it's beached on.

Googling, it seems that this is a recognised technique for dredging: https://www.iadc-dredging.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/fac... Whether it works might be dependent on what kind of soil its sitting on and whether the current is strong enough to take away the dislodged particles.

I guess it would also be hard to work out exactly what you've removed and hence whether you leaving the ship in a position that will stress its structure too much.

Can someone explain why dredging alone isn't sufficient? Is it too slow?

Moving sand is easier than moving a ship+20K containers or removing the 20K containers in hopes of refloating the ship.

So the easiest solution would be to widen the canal at this point - where the ship is currently located and where the ship will need to go as it refloats and turns. Move the banks further back. In effect create a place with enough room for a ship of this size to turnaround.

The canal isn't that deep. Dredgers can be brought on both banks in front and behind the ship. Four dredging teams ought to knock this out pretty quickly.

How do you get the ship to fall into the hole at the right moment?

Earlier today By clicking on some "dots" queued up on that map I think that I saw a ship tagged to transport "livestock" => that might become a small tragedy if they don't manage to clear quickly the channel - those chicken/goats/dont_know_what might be due to die anyway once they reach their destination, but dying of hunger/thirst packed aboard a ship might be worse... :(

Needs a counter for ongoing cost. An experienced military logistics person I know estimated yesterday that the bill for this is up to about $40 billion already.

That might be the total value of impacted shipping, but nobody is going to get a $40 billion bill for this.

Could anyone end up being liable for this? For example, could delayed ships sue canal operators who in turn sue the owners of Ever Given? Alternatively, would an event like this be covered by any insurance policies?

Comedy option, what wacky cold war era aircraft do we have capable of lifting massive loads like a container ship? Perhaps an enormous fleet of Chinook helicopters could take it straight up?

If I understand [1] properly, the Chinook can lift 13 tons[2].

The Evergiven's maximum weight is 200000 tons. So that would be 15000+ Chinooks lifting it. A sight to behold.

Added: Only about 1200 were ever produced, so that won't fly.

[1] https://www.army.mil/article/137584/ch_47_chinook_helicopter

[2] 26000 pounds

It has a 20,000 container capacity, so if it's full and you could unload them at a rate of 1 per minute (assuming multiple choppers) it would take 2 weeks with no stopping, but I assume the frequency would be much lower than that so you're talking possibly months to unload even a fraction of them.

Oh what about magnetism? Could we wrap the ship in wire and send so much current through that it repels against the Earth's magnetic field and shoots itself right into the atmosphere? Basically building a giant rail gun. Might need a small nuclear power plant or two to make it feasible.

Better Cold War option:

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

The ship’s a total loss, but Egypt also gets a new lake!

Even more whimsical option: Evangelion is set in 2015, which means if we were following their projected technology timeline, we could just unload the ship by Eva. Probably unit 0, because Rei tends to get the crappy jobs. Not Asuka, she'd turn it into a contest of who could sink the most tugboats by throwing containers at them or something like that.

The Evas can be airlifted anywhere in the world, but IIRC they have about five minutes of battery power. So, the biggest logistical problem would be getting suitable power on site. What are the voltage/current/frequency requirements of an Eva charger? How many months/years would it take to charge an Eva with a J1772 port or whatever they use in that part of the world? Looks like the nearest Tesla superchargers are in Israel and Jordan, which is too far even if they were compatible. Maybe NERV has a mobile generator?

The Jet Alone folks could put in a competing bid, but their robot would just get sabotaged again.

Not a chance. 224,000 tons. But you could use those to lift containers off one-by-one. Then you still have to move the ship but maybe when it is unloaded it can be done.

Not even close. This ship is absolutely giant.

The best comedy approach is to hire Planet Express to fly in a giant can of WD-40. That stuff will get anything unstuck.

I'd be amazed if the density of weight on the ship is such that an arbitrarily large fleet of Chinooks could actually safely accomplish this. And helicopters flying in a dense formation under strain is quite likely to result in a lot of really big problems.

What about using a really, really long lever?

(200,000 short tons) / (130,000 pounds lifting capacity) = 3,076 Spruce... Geese.

Just use the Philadelphia Experiment technology to teleport it to another dimension

Just attach some thrusters to the dang thing and we are good - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPg4JP1WzQc

The Mil V-12 was built to lift ICBMs, and could easily lift any container.

https://youtu.be/yOApFeEgHcE

An entire fleet of Chinook helecopters would blow a mighty draft of air downward onto the ship, holding it in place.

Maybe supplement the Chinooks with V-22 Ospreys and Harriers?

Smit salvage have got this. I just hope they had enough notice to to take their film crew with them:

https://www.youtube.com/c/SmitSalvageTowage/videos

They said "days to weeks" for how long it will take, so they got plenty of time to film it.

Who else? They'll get the job done but I don't think they are going to accept any deadline.

Recent and related:

Suez canal blocked by a massive ship - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560319 - March 2021 (419 comments)

Also ongoing:

It 'Might Take Weeks' to Free Ship Stuck in Suez Canal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585480 - March 2021 (23 comments)

Suez Canal: How are they trying to free the Ever Given? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586278 - March 2021 (44 comments)

My non-techie wife just said to me, "We need to NFT this situation somehow."

She's been down that rabbit hole ever since reading about the Beeple piece.

I hope she reads the article about Beeple fraud. Buyer and owner of that art are basically investors in the same nft comp, there is no transaction either. It's just a PR.

Maybe some kind of trustless crypto lotto about when the ahip will be freed?

Every question with a binary answer should have its own website like this. I would, in particular, like a website for every room in my house with the question "are my car keys in this room?"

Then I would create an rss feed of each site and subscribe to them.

That’s an O(n) car key search, if you instead asked the question “are my car keys in this half of the house?” you could perform a binary search O(log n).

The tile device works for members of my family who misplace their keys OR their phone:

https://www.thetileapp.com/

People are talking about excavators but why isn't anyone talking about bulldozers? Sure the sand won't be amazing to pull against but it's a lot less movable than water.

It's a Canal not the middle of the ocean. Should be able to get 20+ bulldozers on each side to try and straighten things out. They've got the gears and they've got the tracks. It might not work but it's got a lot better chances than tugs.

This thread reminds me similar threads here and elsewhere when Deep Water Horizon’s well head was spewing hydrocarbons into the Gulf of Mexico for weeks. The immense scale (depth, pressure, etc) and logistics (distance from shore, open ocean) exceeds everyone’s intuitive high-school grasp of physics. The ideas presented are laughable and immediately shot down by people armed with just a few facts (plenty again given the scale and logistics involved).

I’m eager to see what clever solution the engineers eventually pick.

I wonder how expensive and complicated it would be to let it there and dig another lane to bypass it.

I believe this will be the option they take. Not sure how else they plan to clear the canal of obstacles if the Ever Given ends up capsizing and spilling its cargo.

At that point, you may as well have begun digging a new canal anyways.

Very - there's another thread discussing this. Big ships need a lot of room to turn, so the bypass lane would need to be really long.

If you can dig a whole lane why not dig the current one out?

Smit Salvage's current plan is to dredge around the bow and pump out enough fuel to make the ship float higher.[1] More equipment will be brought in.

[1] https://www.tellerreport.com/business/2021-03-26-the-dredgin...

Slap a "free to a good home" sign on it and let the people take back what is rightfully theirs. Ever Given Day shall be celebrated every year commemorating the moment when the free market failed.

"Mommy, did you really get a shipping container full of crockpots when you were my age?" "Yes, my child. We cooked like kings for many a season."

An image showing an excavator near the pointy end.

I'm sure the overwhelming scale is reduced at this proximity.

https://i.imgur.com/aAyrXub.jpeg

Wonder how the data for the actual position of the ship is obtained or if it’s estimated and just hard coded on to the map?

I always love sites that are question in the domain with answers in the webpage as the main content.

VesselFinder and MarineTraffic use the data broadcast by vessels on AIS[0]. The AIS devices can be programmed with the dimensions of the vessel, location of the AIS GPS antenna relative to the vessel (ie, is it right aft, or in the middle, etcetera), and uses sensor data from the network bus to get direction, speed and the like. So yeah, if the ship's AIS is saying "I'm at latitude, longitude doing 0 knots, last reported course was 73 degrees", the websites can generate a somewhat accurate picture.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

This is one particular outlet[1] for that data but, AFAIK, all modern commercial vessels continuously report their location via satellite or, preferably, coastal AIS. That data is collected by something then APIs happen along with aggregation and probably more APIs and... after all that, the data is pretty widely available.

Ship location isn't considered privileged security information which was a bit surprising to me since pirates are still a thing, but yea - that's the state of the world.

Edit: Apparently I forgot to include the link, here it is:

1. https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:32.5/cente...

You can see it here: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000

I know very little about boat data but I was also curious; it looks like it is using Vesselfinder which in turn uses data from this AIS system.

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

There is as much information as a normal human could want to know about how ship location data is tracked ;-)

On iOS you can use Vessel Finder Pro. It provides a real-time world map of all (for some reasonable definition of all) ships. Most of maps views I have seen of this ship are just screen shots from this app. I paid the $10 just to confirm this fact yesterday as Ship Finder, my old standby, didn’t have it.

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

See the "Broadcast information" section.

Position, heading, speed, unique ID, etc. are all broadcast "every 2 to 10 seconds".

I’d like to understand why this hasn’t happened before. What was special about this ship, this passage, etc.?

Is it naive to suggest that they start digging a detour around this roadblock? I feel like it would take less time to do that than to try to move the ship out of the way.

The Army Corps of Engineers can build waterways and levies like it's nobody's business.

Dig it with what? By the time you could get anything in place and start digging any sort of a detour, you'll get this ship removed.

This is not a small detour. These ships can't turn well so any detour would need to be very long and would take months to dig out (even if you had infrastructure in place to do it).

You could nuke it though. Throw a bunch of nukes in a line and you are good to go. :D

Would a good old ship camel work? Position some huge water-filled tanks underneath the ship, pump the water out and replace with air, to lift the ship up. Then hopefully it becomes unstuck enough to tow it clear.

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

In comparison with other proposed solutions I've seen, it would probably not rip the ship apart if distributed evenly over the hull. Yes, the ship is huge, but plain plastic containers and pumps scale quite nicely. Although in good armchair engineering tradition, I have not run the numbers.

Smit are like the Winston Wolf of the shipping business. No problem too big to solve.

Egypt State Income: ca 95.8 billion Canal Revenue: 27.2 billion Makes per revenue per day 74.520.547 74 Million dollars Tax Revenue consumed by ship so far * days: 4 days * 74.520.547 = 298.082.191

If this blockade lasts for 12 days it has reached 1 billion loss >= 1/100 of the egypt household. That household is already under stress from the "escape from cairo"-plans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Administrative_Capital) and covid.

It's not that dramatic:

> In 2020, the total revenue generated amounted to 5.61 billion USD and 18,829 ships with a total net tonnage of 1.17 billion passed through the canal. [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Authority#Revenues

The pandemic needs to stop ASAP so we can throw a Burning Man Middle East Edition next to that ship.

Days of partying in the desert, opening random containers, driving little excavators. What a blast it would be!

The covid regs in Egypt are pretty relaxed if you want to give it a go.

Nuke the thing. Crater fills with water. Continue.

Sort of like blowing up a dead, beached whale? :) p.s. if that doesn't ring a bell with you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34

The ship stuck (Ever Given) is build to Suezmax limits. It fits, but barely.

Ever Given (Suezmax limit)

  length: 399.94 m (400 m)

  tonnage: 199,629 DWT (200,000 DWT)

Forgive me if this comment only belongs on Reddit but it's worth noting Vice[0] thinks this captain was being a little caviler for the lulz of his GPS waypoints.

[0] NSFW https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqwn8/suez-canal-ms-ever-gi...

How does liability work here? Who is liable for all the work required to get the ship dug out? Who keeps the insurance that will pay for all this?

Some of the news stories like this: https://nypost.com/2021/03/24/giant-container-ship-blocking-... are claiming that ship is partially free, what does it mean ? I am confused ....

I think there were some false reports. It's still stuck.

This is an awful amount of weight to be moved. But one thing it has going is that all of the weight is on a vessel that is designed to float. We have canal locks that can lift ships this size.

So my crazy idea is to build a reverse cofferdam around the ship with Larssen steel pilings and pump water into it until the ship floats and straighten the ship and remove the pilings.

Great minds think alike:

https://isthesuezcanalblocked.com

How does liability work in a situation like this? Can other shipping companies sue the at fault company for damages?

I assume the ship had a pilot from the canal authority which should absolve the shipping company from liability.

There's another thread about a private sailboat transiting the canal and it mentioned several pilot changeovers; I have to imagine a giant container ship had something similar.

Disclaimer: I know nearly nothing about the shipping/canal business.

Apparently, the ship drew a giant penis before getting stuck: https://nypost.com/2021/03/24/cargo-ship-drew-penis-before-g...

As bad as this seems, it's still a long way from the ships that were trapped in the Suez for ... eight years. Yep, eight years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DiXRCo7eBs

Anybody know at what point the backed up ships start taking the long way around? (Around Africa!)

It might be already happening? https://twitter.com/AriaCallaghan/status/1375154205233721348

MarineTraffic direct URL: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:5630138/zoo...

Can someone here run the numbers on coating the whole thing in a half inch of peanut butter and unleashing an army of hungry squirrels to eat their way through? I’m not saying it’s the perfect solution, but it’s the best shot we’ve got.

You can also text for status: (586) 800-BOAT

https://twitter.com/kelleyrobinson/status/137519912243366298...

Don't earthquakes cause liquefaction? Any possibility that you could introduce enough energy (possibly sound) in the correct frequency to make the sand act liquid enough that you could rotate the ship until it is free?

I was thinking the same. Get lots of pumps in, drill into the sand bar and pump water to fluidize it. But it's probably still a scale thing, all the proportions involved in this problem are ludicrous.

Given how important this canal is, I would have thought multiple countries have literally wargamed how to remove a blockade from the canal in a way that makes it still usable for shipping.

Why don't they just remove some weight from the front of the ship, this way the ship will pitch towards its back, and then it will slide into the canal bed. Another option is to close the canal around the ship with sand bags or just sand, then fill it with water, once the ship float and untucked itself, move it to the canal bed with the help of tugboats.

In hindsight, was it a good idea to allow ships that big through the canal?

In the future, could they perhaps widen the canal and disallow ships large enough to block it?

Why do I have the suspicion that an engineer raised a concern at some point but was shot down by someone with quotas to meet.

This is the moment for Egypt to learn about backups. Dig a secondary canals next to the existing one. Under normal operations, have one serve the southbound traffic and the other one serving northbound traffic. In crisis, one can be blocked while the other switches direction every six hours or so.

Yes, it is expensive. But not as expensive as having a canal blocked is for the world economy and the Egyptian government.

I’d like to question the premise of the financial impact of this... figures like “$400m/hour” are being bandied around as a measure of the lost trade. But this isn’t necessarily lost trade - merely deferred trade.

So surely the financial impact should be proportional to the interest you’d pay on $400m/hour?

At ~3% interest, we’re talking less than $1m/day.

And so solutions that involve destroying the ship look less attractive.

Some goods are perishable. Modern logistics can have very tight deadlines.

very hard to measure. some goods like food expire. scary to think what about the livestock. other goods lose value due to delays, etc.

It's probably gonna be stuck for a while. I'd suggest that all other ships get started on the scenic detour. Set course for Cape of Good Hope.

People on here pretending they are going to move the ship with all the liability and competing cargo claims.

In 3 months that ship will still be there and they will have dug a new divert to move the canal around it.

With modern methods and tools they could probably divert a 3 mile section of the canal in less time than it would take to move this ship and its cargo.

I know that the ship's crew doesn't actually dock the ship in ports, and each port has dedicated pilots that board the vessel and handle that aspect of the shipment. Is the same true for the canal? It seems it would ostensibly be this pilot's "fault" if that were the case, but I don't actually know who the pilots work for.

The ship is named “Ever Given”, but the huge text on the side says “EVERGREEN”, which is confusingly similar. Does anyone know why?

All of that company's ships names start with 'Ever'.

Evergreen is the company, they probably just want to show that more then the ship name

"Ever Given" is the ship's name

Evergreen is the company that owns (manages?) the ship

The company name is Evergreen, the name of the ship is Ever Given.

You'd think Elon would call the captain some awful names and then claim he can free it with his flamethrower and submarine!

I find simple website extremely fascinating. Just answering one question

Another similar one is http://www.isnasdaqopen.com/ This tells your if the stock market is open or not

Can they drive pilings on the edge of the canal, and attach cables from the pilings to the boat at various points? Seems like driving pilings is an operation which can be done in parallel, while unloading the containers is mostly serialized. I’m also assuming that wenches connected to pilings are able to pull harder than tug boats.

Since it might takes weeks to clear the canal, can anyone here comment on the implications this will have on world trade?

Build a bypass in the empty desert to the east of where the ship is stranded.

Deal with getting this ship unstuck in parallel.

Might take a while.

I'm curious how fixing these sorts of events gets funded. I imagine the expense is massive. Is it insurance? Is the allocated amount anywhere near proportional to the money being lost to being stuck? Who eventually bears the cost?

~15% of the World's trade is dependent on it and this is taking much longer than expected. Why?

Nine women can't make a baby in a month. Some things just take time, regardless of how much resources you throw at it.

I wonder, could you liquify the soil around the buried part of the ship by pumping air into the surrounding areas?

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

Panama Canal Authority soon to announce widening capital works.

> As Relay's chief competitor in this region, we of Windsong have benefited modestly from the overflow; however, until now we thought it inappropriate to propose a coordinated response to the problem.

This photo gives some perspective

https://globalnews.ca/news/7719176/suez-canal-ship-digger-ex...

I know meta-posts are discouraged, but folks, you were supposed to be micro dosing.

I guess it's pretty complicated, but if it were less stuck, I wonder if they could use the anchors to winch it out of the tricky spot it's in. Use a tug to drop one on the other side of the canal, then pull it in to move the boat sideways.

Why not send thousands of men with shovels? That's how canals were dug in the past.

You can even text now to get its status

https://twitter.com/kelleyrobinson/status/137519912243366298...

On the same topic, this is an excellent read: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-seacowboys/

Why not some large pumps, suck up water from the canal and use jets to blast the sand out from under the bow. Slowly shift the sand around.

Granted they might have to dredge to clear that sand out of the canal.

Surely it's been thought of....

Has Elon Musk volunteered to fly out there with a portable submarine yet?

The canal, for how important it is, sure hasn't seen much in the way of investment, it seems.

They could have two lanes of concrete-lined canal I'm sure, but it's just a ditch with a tiny excavator.

They could set up pumps to put water on the two spots where it is stuck, and at the same time pump out the water/sand mixture.

This way it will increase the depth and width of the canal just where it is needed.

I wonder how much economic damage is caused every day that ship is stuck.

I wonder whether it has had an impact on drugs price in the streets

Drop salt around the ship to increase the buoyancy of the water...

How about hard fixing heavy duty winches on the ship itself, attach the other end of cables to the shore and make the ship to pull itself in unstuck direction gradually?

Is there a website where I can find the historical data of ships in the area? Are they still waiting for the ship to get unstuck or are now going around southern Africa?

Is it strange to anyone that we load ships to this capacity? Is this the standard procedure?

I’m essentially wondering why this is more cost-effective than building more, smaller ships.

You are all missing the simple solution: construct another canal next to it, so the other ships can continue to pass.

( I'm joking, do not take this as a serious solution )

Just like Austin Powers:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/IGiQOCX9UbM

I wonder if we could liquify the soil and float the ship out of the mud.

One could imagine 15 pile drivers pounding on the shore and a couple of tugs reversing the ship.

It’s refreshing to see a problem that’s easy to identify.

Apparently the Suez shaves off 3 days of travel time and saves $360,000 of fuel.

If we're talking weeks to get unstuck, they better head around the tip of Africa.

Visited this on my phone and it said "No.". I yelped. Turns out there's just an issue with the site on mobile! Still stuck.

Has anyone checked the ship’s manifest? Maybe we’ll get lucky and find out it’s carrying 20,000 containers of thermite.

What's the estimated economic impact of the blockage? Will other ships have to wait or is reroute even an option?

Pulleys man. Millions and millions of pulleys. Such a magnificent system of pulleys that a 3 year old could pull it.

n00b question: how tough is to steer the ship through the canal? Is this a silly mistake or a genuine mistake? Will the Captain of the ship get fined? Who will foot the bill of this whole rescue operation? Also, how much extra cost & days will it take for a ship to take the other (longer) route?

Now just think how easy some terrorists can block the canal by just putting a hole in that sitting ship...

Not sure how much time it took to build the website, but I assume the author bets on a long shelf life. :)

Why do so many people here think they have some solution that could get this done faster? There is an entire industry that is built around heavy salvage, and their best and brightest are working around the clock to resolve the situation.

Everybody here knows what Dunning Kruger is.

If you have a solution that starts with: "Why don't they just...". The answer is either 1. They will when they can, that kind of operation is very hard to set up in the Egyptian Desert, or 2. That is a dumb/impractical/impossible thing you are suggesting.

This is probably not going to be read by anyone, but: Now that the ship is unstuck, this website says "no. What a relief" and links to an xkcd comic (611, Disaster Voyeurism). I typically append the m. To make it the mobile site (easier to get the alt text on the image). So I did, read the comic, hit back, which took me to the desktop site, hit back again... And it took me to the YouTube rickroll video?!

First I thought this was hilarious. I hit back again which took me to the istheshipstillstuck.com.

To confirm, I tried the above routine again. And it won't take me to the rickroll video anymore! I am not sure what's happening.

Has this happened to anybody else? What's going on? I'm using the Brave browser on Android (whatever the latest flavor is on Samsung devices). It's hilarious, but it also makes me concerned. Anybody?

Between this and COVID maybe it's long overdue to rethink global JIT strategies?

Do you know why half of the internet is using evergiven when on all the photos is written evergreen?

At this point just fill in that section of the canal, leave the ship there, and dig a new canal.

Just adding a random voice to this cluster of a thread.

Lots of talk about lifting via crane or chopper. And it's not clear that it's possible. I just saw a photo of the rear (side?) Of ship that makes me wonder: how much lateral force would you need? Could you jack a container up an inch and then slide it off?

A balloon half a kilometer in radius filled with hydrogen should be able to float the ship.

Has anyone called Elon Musk yet?

Where is Superman when you need one . They should make this part of the next movie.

Who designed this critical piece of infrastructure with a single point of failure?

If fire a bomb from one side of ship, Does the wave can push out ship stuck ?

Maybe disassemble part of the ship to disgorge its contents closer to equipment?

This sounds like a great "how ww3 started" intro story for a game

One nuclear bomb could fix this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

Writing off the entire ship would cost far less than the delays cost in a day.

How insane would it be to flood the area around the ship with levees?

How about the COSCO ship that's been parked by the bay bridge forever?

solution: Honk the fog horn until the sand vibrates away from the sound.

They need to pump out sand from beneath the ship. If it is indeed sand.

Job interview question: how many helicopters would it take to lift it?

Get Elon's boring machines to dig in the right location(s) ...

My prediction:

The ship isn’t going anywhere. It will need to be disassembled.

It was only a matter of time https://twitter.com/addiiceland/status/1374634903321649154

The movie rights should pay for some of the salvage costs

They're missing the attribution to OpenStreetMap.

How long before this gets made into a Netflix series?

One peaceful nuclear explosion would do the trick.

Archimedes would have a solution for this.

Can you implement an API for that? ;)

Eureka! Make the water sufficiently dense by dissolving salt or another chemical into it. And/or chilling it.

Genuine question: why not simply pull its back in the reverse direction it was going, until its front is unstuck?

I wonder if they could build a dam around the ship and lift it with water.

So what do I buy or sell or short to protect my portfolio?

Dig a bypass canal and leave the ship there.

Can't wait for elon to offer a solution...

This reminds me a lot of an immersive art installation I saw in Turkey 6 years ago of an imagined future where an oil tanker got stuck in the Bosphorous and permanently changed local society.

https://worldarchitecture.org/architecture-news/ccehp/strait...

Elon, we need you ;)

Surprised nobody has suggested blowing it up yet haha

A single canal is a single point of failure. We need to have multiple canals to handle unexpected failures.

Looking at how stuck the ship is, this could also be a new terrorist vector to attack the channel via such a „derailed“ ship.

I feel like this whole thing is a perfect metaphor for the current US government

Weeks? My 0.02 is dig a bypass using dredges/pumps, then it's a 'days' problem.

Of course it won't help this ship, but at least the canal functions.

OT: is it a given that the person responsible (the captain?) will be fired once this is over? Can the org running the Suez Canal deny entry to vessels by black listing the captain?

Summary of this thread: A bunch of people with no experience or knowledge of the problem come up with some half-arsed "solutions" because they think that they are smarter than people who do.

Where have we heard this before? Oh yeah - Elon Musk rescuing people from a flooded cave.

Had rockets not been so regulated, this problem could have easily been solved. It would not be cheap but with a 150million insurance budget it is doable. Egypt is losing 400million in trade every hour. The ship weighs 200 000 tons. You only need to drag it out of the sand, not bring it to LEO. Another option would be a lot of shaped charges but the side effects are much more catastrophic if things go wrong. In the olden days, they would just use nuclear (See project Plowshare for the Panama Canal).

Before you downvote, do the math.

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