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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

Some back-of-the-napkin math: Suez canal is about 200km and was built in ~10 years, that's about 20km per year (ignoring start/stop time and everything else). It was built around ~1860 so let's say we're at least 20% more effective at this time (probably more), leaves us with 24km per year, or 2 kilometer per month.

Let's say we start digging around the ship (I did a very shitty sketch with Google Maps here: https://i.imgur.com/A6sdvBn.png) and it seems we're ending up with about 6km, so doable in ~3 months. Add in the panic of countless of countries to unblock the canal itself and we could probably do it in a month if we really try.

At least based on my estimates (I'm a nobody with no formal education and also zero experience in shipping/logistics/boats/canals/construction), it seems it wouldn't be a multi-year project, but I'm more than eager to hear why I'm wrong.

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I feel like agreeing with you in the "under a year" estimate, but a month seems too short. IMHO, the real problem would be the slow start.

Based on the Wikipedia page, it looks like the construction itself took 10 years but the preparations took an additional 4. Given that "over 30,000 people were working on the canal at any given period", you would first have to build enough infrastructure for all the workers who would be doing the digging, then transport them there (plus the machines), pay them, feed them, and then clean it up once the work is done.

If that's the case, then waiting the 2-3 weeks it would take to dislodge the ship itself may make more economic sense.

I hear you, but I think the situation back in 1860 was a bit different than now. We could probably move 30000 people from Cairo to Suez in less than a day, while back then it would have been a huge undertaking (I could be wrong, I'm not a historian). Same with preparation and everything else. Add in the novelty of the canal at the time of construction, compared to now when we have lots of experience (we as in humanity, not me).

> If that's the case, then waiting the 2-3 weeks it would take to dislodge the ship itself may make more economic sense.

Is it actually established that it's even possible to dislodge the ship in it's current state? As far as I've read, we don't really know how to even get the ship unstuck at this point. Some people are pointing to the ship being too heavy, so would need unloading first, but that'll take months.

The canal was expanded in 2015 to support bigger ships. You can lookup how long that took and treat it is a lower bound because this would not have most of the work already done like when expanding the existing canal.

Dredging a 35-kilometers-long and 24-meters-deep shipping route in a year

https://www.magazine.boskalis.com/issue02/suez-canal-expansi...

Dredging is so much easier than digging, but it still works as a very conservative lower bound. That's 3km a month, so a diversion of 6km would take at least 2 months.

But earthworks of that size have to be planned and approved and the labor organized. It could never be done in that time frame.

But in what way would digging a bypass be faster than 'just' digging out the sides of the canal where the ship is now stuck? No matter how you put it, digging out the ship has to be less work than digging a bypass.

Secondly, considering that parts of the Suez canal were dug out by hand (when were the first mechanical diggers like we have now developed?), digging speed must be much more than 20% higher than in the 1800's.

Fascinating stuff. Apart from the stress and time pressure, it must be a great job to do engineering on something like this.

Probably easier to spend that investment on building a monster refloation device or mobile unloading system.

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