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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever tried to stack containers before? Or had to airlift something via tow on a helicopter? You can do the latter (I watched it happen in the military), but the former isn’t happening from a helicopter, not into a floating barge anyway.

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There's no shortage of nearby desert not being used for anything else.

But the final goal is to put the containers back on the ship after it gets unstuck, no? I imagine the point of the containers being on the ship in the first place is that there are not enough trucks on land to get the containers off the desert to their destinations.

Right now the goal is to unblock the canal; if the entire cargo were lost in the process, that would be expensive, but I'm not confident it'd be more expensive than blocking shipping through for an extra fortnight.

it follows then that we should consider blowing up the ship

I suspect that might very well be on the table.

Hell, a big enough explosion might prevent ships from ever getting stuck at that spot again.

And you could recoup the costs by selling tickets to watch the explosion.

@nerfhammer: Great idea, littering the canal with sharp debris pieces so the next ships will be torn to shreds :)

Dredging is the easy part. Not sure how much swimming happens in the canal. We only have to worry about cutting through steel, not skin.

Ships traveling at 7 knots over a minefield of sunken containers will happily shred their steel skin.

It sounded like they were intended to drop them on land, where one would hope no ships would be hitting them. 'Lost' would be referring to the likely chance that once put on the desert they wouldn't be retrieved.

Ideally, but the value of whatever cargo is on the ship is worth less than a functioning global supply chain.

How the insurance would be settled would be interesting, I suppose it'd be the same as though the cargo was blown overboard.

The ship isn't floating though, that's the problem. But I'd imagine it's very stable when trying to lift stuff of due to it being stuck.

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