39 ms·

Is that ship still stuck?

• donaldo 6y ago
  Wow, didn’t know it was stuck horizontally. Hope they can fix it.
• cghendrix 6y ago
  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.
  • samizdis 6y ago
    You can see it here: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000 https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000
    • Animats 6y ago
      Yes. I notice that the two Maersk freighters behind the Ever Given are no longer there. It looks like all traffic has been cleared from the canal on both sides. Zoom out. The north end of the Gulf of Suez looks like a parking lot. So does the Med north of Port Said. So does Fayed, the lake in the middle of the canal. Smit, the big Dutch salvage firm, has been called in and already has their first heavy equipment, a dredger, on site. "Days to weeks" is all they'll say. The good case is that they pump fuel and ballast water out of the ship, plus some dredging, and it floats free. The not so good case is they bring in a big crane and start unloading containers. The bad case is that the ship is partly sunk and will have to be patched and refloated. The really bad case is that the hull is so badly damaged that the ship has to be cut apart in place. Meanwhile, shipping from China to Europe is now US$4000/TEU. Usually it's around US$1000. China's "Belt and Road" rail plan may pay off.
      • stragies 6y ago
        Or the super-extra-bad case: The ship breaks while attempting to pull it free. Pieces of ship + 20000 containers in the canal. How long would it be blocked for. Full-spectrum catastrophe!
        • laurent92 6y ago
          How far could it go? Could it go political about Egypt’s management of the crisis?
      • jtbayly 6y ago
        > China's "Belt and Road" rail plan may pay off. That’s great conspiracy theory fodder right there. :) Edit: perhaps it’s not so far fetched, if the boat drew a giant penis before getting stuck.
      • jacquesm 6y ago
        Removing ballast from a ship with such a heavy top load is super risky. That could turn 'days or weeks' into 'months or years'.
  • ceejayoz 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_system 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".
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • lacker 6y ago
    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_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 ;-)
  • onedognight 6y ago
    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.
  • munk-a 6y ago
    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/centery:30.8/zoom:9 https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:32.5/cente...
    • cricalix 6y ago
      As a small vessel (10 metres) owner and operator, it's quite nice that AIS operates over VHF. I can install an AIS receiver and see precisely what's coming my way, and the instrumentation available to me can predict whether I might collide with the ship, or if I'll pass ahead/behind (I prefer behind). Useful in the dark when distance is hard to gauge. Saw on twitter the other day that one vessel going past the east coast of Africa had changed their info field (destination I think) to "ARMED GUARD ONBOARD"..
      • bmurray7jhu 6y ago
        Twitter link: https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1374803809696817154 https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1374803809696817154
    • WJW 6y ago
      It's super useful to know the location, speed and course of other vessels nearby for navigational purposes. For those few regions where piracy is a serious issue, vessels are either escorted by navy ships in convoys, arrange private security contractors or turn off AIS. The benefits of hiding yourself don't outweigh the downsides though, especially not in "civilized" oceans.
    • laurent92 6y ago
      > isn’t considered privileged information Not only that, but Bloomberg terminals have the ship locations in real time because it impacts trading a lot: Petrol, ore, cereals, etc.
  • cricalix 6y ago
    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_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...
• ksec 6y ago
  ~15% of the World's trade is dependent on it and this is taking much longer than expected. Why?
  • ksm1717 6y ago
    For real. Why haven’t they just mobilized hacker news?
    • gizmo385 6y ago
      "We should take the ship, AND PUSH IT SOMEWHERE ELSE" :D [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0sTNLdNhuE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0sTNLdNhuE
      • ksm1717 6y ago
        You can trust that I don’t need to follow that link, brother.
  • albertgoeswoof 6y ago
    Because it’s hard
    • londons_explore 6y ago
      Just dig a new canal around the ship? A quarter mile diversion can't take that long to dig. The whole canal is 120 miles, so an extra quarter mile they should be able to dig in a few days I would think?
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        Lol no
      • gizmo385 6y ago
• ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  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.
  • dcolkitt 6y ago
    At the very least, why aren't they using helicopters to take the containers off one-by-one. That would reduce the overall weight, and it'd be easier to move an empty ship than one weighed down by cargo.
    • londons_explore 6y ago
      It looks like there might be a kind of priority difference going on here... To all the ship owners and cargo owners, this blockage is a big problem and massive amounts of money should be spent to solve it. But to the canal owners, they are only losing relatively small amounts of revenue by the canal being shut, so while they are sending all their boats to try pull it free, they aren't yet at the stage of calling in the army helicopters to help unload the ship. At some point Egypts government will probably get involved, and then the army will show up with tanks with a lot of pulling power, massive winches installed on the shoreline, and helicopters for unloading.
      • Baeocystin 6y ago
        Just to throw some numbers out there, last year the canal grossed ~15 million USD/day in revenue from the toll charge.
      • dragontamer 6y ago
        An entire fleet of tug-boats seem unable to move the ship. I don't think tanks would fare much better. The proper solution is probably (?? I'm not an engineer, just spitballing here) a system of pulleys. See Archemedies and The Syracusia: Archemedies allegedly moved a ship powered only with his own muscles using only a system of pulleys as an assist. I realize that the Syracusia is probably smaller than this container ship in the canal. Still though: a system of pulleys is probably cheaper and stronger than what a team of Tanks would do. ------------- They're at least in a situation where there's a ton of land nearby that can serve as an anchor point. I mean... the problem right now is probably just figuring out where and how to safely pull the ship. They need to apply hundreds-of-thousands of tons of force in a way that: 1. Won't break the ship apart 2. Successfully dislodges it Its a relatively simple problem to apply hundreds-of-thousands of tons of force. But doing it in such a way to keep the ship floating... that's the hard part.
• nitramm 6y ago
  Do you know why half of the internet is using evergiven when on all the photos is written evergreen?
  • gizmo385 6y ago
    Because Evergreen is the name of the company that operates the ship [1] and Ever Given is the name of the ship [2]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Marine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Marine [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_Given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_Given
  • topspin 6y ago
    Evergreen Marine Corporation owns the ship named Ever Given.
  • andylash 6y ago
    The name of the company is Evergreen. All their ships start with Ever. This ship is Evergiven.
    • JKCalhoun 6y ago
      "Ever Grounded"?
  • tsm 6y ago
    Evergreen is the company name, Ever Given (which does appear on the ship in much smaller letters) is the ship's name.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • jachee 6y ago
    This confused me, too, at first. The vessel name (on the bow) is Ever Given. The company operating it, emblazoned on the side in large letters, is Evergreen.
  • JKCalhoun 6y ago
    Evergreen is the company, all their ships are named "Ever X" where "X" is some word that begins with "G". Like how some people name all their kids with the same first letter. I know, weird.
• dnautics 6y ago
  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.
  • WJW 6y ago
    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.
    • em-bee 6y ago
      do you mean this case? https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/frachter-rammt-faehre-knapp-an-der-katastrophe-vorbei-32016794 https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/frachter-rammt-faehre-knapp-an-d... that was the very same ship EDIT: no, the incident needing 12 tugs was a different ship. see comment below.
      • Forge36 6y ago
        This gave me a good laugh.
      • wussboy 6y ago
        Oh my god who is driving this thing?
        • hyperbovine 6y ago
          When the wind picks up, nobody, which seems to be the problem.
          • nullsense 6y ago
• gm3dmo 6y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/c/SmitSalvageTowage/videos
  • aidenn0 6y ago
    They said "days to weeks" for how long it will take, so they got plenty of time to film it.
  • jacquesm 6y ago
    Who else? They'll get the job done but I don't think they are going to accept any deadline.
• TedShiller 6y ago
  I feel like this whole thing is a perfect metaphor for the current US government
• blhack 6y ago
  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.
  • grenoire 6y ago
    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?
    • WJW 6y ago
      They hired a company specialized in this kind of stuff (Boskalis), but as their CEO mentioned of TV it depends on how stuck it is. If you're lucky, pumping out the fuel and ballast can make the ship light enough to drag it clear with tugboats. If that doesn't work, you might have to unload some, most or all of the 20k containers from the ship to make it light enough. It can be done, but depending on how much is required it'll take a few days to a week to get the required equipment all the way to Egypt.
      • maxerickson 6y ago
        If I estimated right, the fuel is a few percent of the total mass (maybe around 5%). Not the most encouraging result.
        • userbinator 6y ago
          If it was floating, raising it out of the water by 5% would not be insignificant, and help relieve some of the forces holding it in place.
• aritmo 6y ago
  MarineTraffic direct URL: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:5630138/zoom:13 https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:5630138/zoo...
• _the_inflator 6y ago
  Looking at how stuck the ship is, this could also be a new terrorist vector to attack the channel via such a „derailed“ ship.
  • Tenoke 6y ago
    It does legitimately seem like you can do tremendous damage by derailing a few ships in the right spots. Bringing bombs or other small ships or something else seems doable for a terrorist organization on the face of it.
    • WWWWH 6y ago
      Wasn’t this the plot of an Ian Banks novel? Canal dreams. Imagine die hard, with the Bruce Willis part being a middle-aged, female, Japanese cellist.
    • bigfudge 6y ago
      This is true more generally. When I lived in London and the IRA campaign was going on I never understood why they didn't just set fire to a few stolen vans on Euston road/City road/Waterloo bridge every morning rather than actually killing people. Would have been more effective.
      • randompwd 6y ago
        Such an ignorant comment.
        • bigfudge 6y ago
          How so? I lived in the city and this is what I thought at the time. I might have been mistaken (which is part why I posted it here... to hear alternative arguments).
      • simmerup 6y ago
        What freedom fighter would throw away their life to cause a traffic jam? And what government would cave to whats essentially a minor inconvenience
• bawbag 6y ago
  Not related to this, but is there a company out there who could profit from this kind of thing? "I got stuck but my friend made it through, prices are up lol".
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• elihu 6y ago
  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
  • brundolf 6y ago
    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
    • elihu 6y ago
      I had assumed the containers would be retrieved by tugboats or whatever works. Depending on what's in the containers, I'd expect most would probably float, at least for a little while until water leaks in. Maybe long enough to drag them out of the way; either to the sides of the channel or out of the water altogether.
  • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > 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.
    • laurent92 6y ago
      Yes. Unloading is a science, also, if you want to avoid capsizing. And the risk is increased because they don’t know on which sand the boat rests (it may be balanced at some point just by one bank + the pressure of the flow of water) and the tides add some random every 6 hrs.
• qbasic_forever 6y ago
  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?
  • munk-a 6y ago
    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.
    • qbasic_forever 6y ago
      The rotor wash beneath it all would be breathtaking.. and might blow all the water out of the canal. :)
      • munk-a 6y ago
        Somebody get Randall Munroe on the phone - I think we've found the next What-If topic.
      • TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Which makes me think - what about using all these choppers to blow the water in - and keep it there? :). (I assume this is an equivalent problem to the lifting problem, as the extra pressure they'd be fighting would be that of the ship displacing water.)
        • munk-a 6y ago
          That's actually an interesting idea - set up a temporary lock/dam on either side of the ship to float it. If, instead of a boring dam made out of concrete or something "normal" we used a fleet of Chinooks then all the better! I do believe this is probably one of the solutions that's being investigated but I also believe it's 1. Super expensive to construct an impromptu dam under water 2. Floating a listing ship can result in more severe listing if you're not careful (See, for instance, the fact that when a ship beaches itself while the tide is out it's initially bad news - and when the tide starts to come back in it becomes significantly worse news. Learning and humor are fun together!
• cmckn 6y ago
  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.
  • timgarner0 6y ago
    The site provides a tongue-in-cheek warning for this: "Tornado Guard warnings apply." https://xkcd.com/937 https://xkcd.com/937
• TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  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?
• electrotype 6y ago
  Genuine question: why not simply pull its back in the reverse direction it was going, until its front is unstuck?
  • sliken 6y ago
    Because the momentum of a huge ship dug quite deeply into the sides of the canal quite hard, so it's no longer floating. It's nowhere close to floating currently, and a ship can't be pulled with arbitrarily large forces without damage.
  • vpribish 6y ago
    the stern is stuck already in the other bank
  • artificial 6y ago
    Both ends are jammed now.
• anigbrowl 6y ago
  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.
  • Denvercoder9 6y ago
    That might be the total value of impacted shipping, but nobody is going to get a $40 billion bill for this.
    • blhack 6y ago
      Those two guys on excavators are gonna be RICH!
      • avaldeso 6y ago
        Unless they, somehow, rip a hole in the hull. That would be FUBAR.
    • laurent92 6y ago
      Do they have deadlines for delivery and late fees? I’ve heard a quarter of the worldwide cargo capacity will be delayed by this event, this could rise very fast.
    • anigbrowl 6y ago
      There will not be a single bill of that size, and directly insured costs are likely to top out at a 1-200 million. But the knock-on shipping delays are likely not insured and will weigh heavily on the charter sector (who rent space on the ships by the day): https://lloydslist.maritimeintelligence.informa.com/LL1136251/Almost-all-Suez-tailback-vessels-likely-lack-cover-for-delays https://lloydslist.maritimeintelligence.informa.com/LL113625... An interesting stat there is that on the Ever Given alone there are ~20,000 boxes (cargo containers) with an average 20 shipments (from different people) in each. So that's ~400,000 commercial deliveries held up on one ship alone.
  • divbzero 6y ago
• piinbinary 6y ago
  I wonder if they could build a dam around the ship and lift it with water.
  • Denvercoder9 6y ago
    Physically that would work, but this ship has a draught of 14.5 meters. You'd need to build a pretty high dam. It would need to cross the canal twice, as otherwise the water level inside the dam would never be higher than the current water level, and you'd need to pump in the water. Then, once the ship floats, you'd somehow need to move it out of your small artificial lake into the canal, and remove the dam you created in the canal. It's easier to lighten the ship.
    • CRConrad 6y ago
      Two temporary dams across the canal, above and below the ship; basically creating a temporary lock in the canal. Sandbags and tarpaulin, or two huge balloons you fill with water so they squeeze themselves stuck against the sides. (In both cases, with suitable temporary support structures on the outer sides. For a base, use a big empty ship or three on each end, run them up against the dam and scuttle them, then refloat when all is done?) Then fill the lock you just built with water pumped in from the canal, and the ship should float. When it's upright in the middle of the canal, dismantle the lock again. It doesn't have to be all that super tight or anything; as long as your pumps can outrun the leakage, just keep running them for the duration. The GP is only the second such suggestion I see here. The first was on the second sub-page of comments (close to a comment about lifting the ship with a hydrogen balloon, for a search term; combining them is where I got the water balloon idea in stead of sandbags). Mine would have been the third. Quite honestly and seriously seems far from unfeasible. And perhaps, depending on how fast you can get enough sandbags (or just the bags; sand should be available nearby?), tarpaulins, and pumps there, faster than most other suggestions.
• gm3dmo 6y ago
  Smit are like the Winston Wolf of the shipping business. No problem too big to solve.
• dang 6y ago
  Recent and related: Suez canal blocked by a massive ship - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560319 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586278 - March 2021 (44 comments)
• nabla9 6y ago
  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)
• damontal 6y ago
  Job interview question: how many helicopters would it take to lift it?
  • BrianOnHN 6y ago
    15,000 Chinooks. Good luck finding that many, though.
    • sn_master 6y ago
      How about the Skycrane? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDQrUiCd61U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDQrUiCd61U Or Volvo trucks? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3yw4Qp8bX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3yw4Qp8bX4
• jay_kyburz 6y ago
  Anybody know at what point the backed up ships start taking the long way around? (Around Africa!)
  • bertmuthalaly 6y ago
    It might be already happening? https://twitter.com/AriaCallaghan/status/1375154205233721348 https://twitter.com/AriaCallaghan/status/1375154205233721348
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• aidenn0 6y ago
  A balloon half a kilometer in radius filled with hydrogen should be able to float the ship.
  • BrianOnHN 6y ago
    How would you acquire that much hydrogen, and how much would it cost?
    • aidenn0 6y ago
      Hydrogen is cheap; That's only about $42M at today's prices. If it wasn't clear the whole "lift it with a balloon" thing was a joke though
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• evanlong 6y ago
  Great minds think alike: https://isthesuezcanalblocked.com https://isthesuezcanalblocked.com
• rbx 6y ago
  Apparently, the ship drew a giant penis before getting stuck: https://nypost.com/2021/03/24/cargo-ship-drew-penis-before-getting-stuck-in-suez-canal/ https://nypost.com/2021/03/24/cargo-ship-drew-penis-before-g...
• hikerclimb 6y ago
  I hope it never gets unstuck
• tediousdemise 6y ago
  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.
  • saberdancer 6y ago
    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
    • laurent92 6y ago
      When in doubt, C4. But it wouldn’t even help: It is shallow and there isn’t enough water to fill such a hole.
    • avaldeso 6y ago
      > You could nuke it though. Throw a bunch of nukes in a line and you are good to go. :D I don't know if you're joking or not but there were tactical demolition nukes in the 60's. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Munition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Mu...
• dghlsakjg 6y ago
  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.
• tamaharbor 6y ago
  Drop salt around the ship to increase the buoyancy of the water...
• drno123 6y ago
  One peaceful nuclear explosion would do the trick.
• mongol 6y ago
  They need to pump out sand from beneath the ship. If it is indeed sand.
• cgdub 6y ago
  A single canal is a single point of failure. We need to have multiple canals to handle unexpected failures.
  • cr1895 6y ago
    Well, you can always sail around.
• barbegal 6y ago
  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.
  • maxerickson 6y ago
    The excavators make sense as the first stage of a dredging operation.
  • the8472 6y ago
    > 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?
    • float4 6y ago
      The dredging for that project was done by a Belgian and a Dutch company, and I don't think they left their ships and equipment there afterwards.
      • tshaddox 6y ago
        It also took many years.
      • Denvercoder9 6y ago
• kergonath 6y ago
  I wonder how expensive and complicated it would be to let it there and dig another lane to bypass it.
  • FartyMcFarter 6y ago
    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.
  • imtringued 6y ago
    If you can dig a whole lane why not dig the current one out?
  • bruiseralmighty 6y ago
    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.
• Jedd 6y ago
  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 https://i.imgur.com/aAyrXub.jpeg
• Karupan 6y ago
  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?
• phenylene 6y ago
  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.
  • mark_mart 6y ago
    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.
    • SilverRed 6y ago
      I feel like everyone was going through massive amounts mental gymnastics to justify how NFTs are not just a scam like they look on the surface but how they are actually legitimate. News companies chipped in with the "well um actually value is just made up anyway" But no, in the end it was just another crypto scam.
    • quickthrower2 6y ago
      She needs to read this to come up with an equally genius marketing plan for her NFT. An NFT is about marketing. The products value is how well the product is marketed and nothing else. It’s purified capitalism!
  • meowster 6y ago
    Maybe some kind of trustless crypto lotto about when the ahip will be freed?
• tobr 6y ago
  The ship is named “Ever Given”, but the huge text on the side says “EVERGREEN”, which is confusingly similar. Does anyone know why?
  • dbish 6y ago
    Evergreen is the company, they probably just want to show that more then the ship name
  • jacquesm 6y ago
    All of that company's ships names start with 'Ever'.
  • es7 6y ago
    "Ever Given" is the ship's name Evergreen is the company that owns (manages?) the ship
  • chanandler_bong 6y ago
    The company name is Evergreen, the name of the ship is Ever Given.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• CosmicShadow 6y ago
  How long before this gets made into a Netflix series?
  • sn_master 6y ago
    We'll need a plot twist then, what would it be?
• ryanmarsh 6y ago
  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.
• lovemenot 6y ago
  Eureka! Make the water sufficiently dense by dissolving salt or another chemical into it. And/or chilling it.
• zepearl 6y ago
  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... :(
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• einpoklum 6y ago
  I wonder how much economic damage is caused every day that ship is stuck.
  • mrep 6y ago
    The canal generated 5.61 billion USD in 2020 [0] so it is costing them 15 million dollars a day in lost revenue. Shipping companies now have to go around Africa which costs uses more fuel and has other costs but now they don't have to pay the toll and I'm betting the spread between the toll price and the additional cost of going around Africa isn't very large or Egypt is leaving free money on the table. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Authority#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20the%20total%20revenue,billion%20passed%20through%20the%20canal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Authority#:~:text=I...
    • einpoklum 6y ago
      That's lost revenue for Egypt - there is also the losses all along the supply lines for all the goods that aren't reaching their destination. Oh, and some of the goods may even be perishable, so they may be lost completely...
• alottafunchata 6y ago
  How about the COSCO ship that's been parked by the bay bridge forever?
• jzl 6y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DiXRCo7eBs
• Imnimo 6y ago
  At this point just fill in that section of the canal, leave the ship there, and dig a new canal.
• johncessna 6y ago
  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.
• tomcam 6y ago
  Maybe disassemble part of the ship to disgorge its contents closer to equipment?
• pfdietz 6y ago
  Nuke the thing. Crater fills with water. Continue.
  • rossdavidh 6y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34
    • pfdietz 6y ago
      Yes, exactly like that, which I had been thinking of. :)
• lawwantsin17 6y ago
  SINK THE FUCKING SHIP
• ic0n0cl4st 6y ago
  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-by-neyran-turan-at-salt.html https://worldarchitecture.org/architecture-news/ccehp/strait...
• testfoobar 6y ago
  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.
  • the_local_host 6y ago
    How do you get the ship to fall into the hole at the right moment?
• Zhenya 6y ago
  Can't wait for elon to offer a solution...
  • rohitb91 6y ago
    Which citizen and insult will he come up with next
    • hellotomyrars 6y ago
      This time perhaps he’ll hire a private investigator who isn’t a total huckster. Better yet just hire dozens and wait until one shakes something loose that way he can substantiate his bullshit before he spews it.
  • divbzero 6y ago
    Strap it to a Falcon Heavy.
    • Aeolun 6y ago
      How many falcon heavies would we need to lift 200,000 metric tons?
      • themgt 6y ago
        Apparently Falcon Heavy has 5 million lbs of thrust, so about 88 Falcon Heavies? SuperHeavy will have 17 million lbs of thrust so if Elon could deliver 25 SuperHeavy boosters with a total of 700 Raptor engines it could lift the Ever Given? Someone should simulate this in Kerbal.
        • trothamel 6y ago
          If we're going unrealistic, there are even better plans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guMumPFBag&t=123s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guMumPFBag&t=123s
• JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  So what do I buy or sell or short to protect my portfolio?
• seized 6y ago
  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....
• ajb 6y ago
  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/facts-about-water-injection-dredging.pdf 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.
  • BrianOnHN 6y ago
    Can someone explain why dredging alone isn't sufficient? Is it too slow?
    • Havoc 6y ago
      Really deep keel in not much water. At shore zero water. Ie It’s properly stuck
    • crazyjncsu 6y ago
      I expect dredging will be the main solution. Dredges are just slow moving, so they’ve taken a while to arrive. I’d also expect some long reach excavators and/or draglines to be working from the shore and/or barges. They probably just underestimated the stuckedness at first. Throw in some ineptitude and corruption, and you have this royal mess.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • ajb 6y ago
      Are dredges normally expected to access underneath a ship? I thought under the typical use cases they have a clear work area.
• jaza 6y ago
  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.
• mmcconnell1618 6y ago
  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?
  • kortex 6y ago
    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.
• IAmGraydon 6y ago
  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.
• davidw 6y ago
  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.
  • agrajag 6y ago
    You're breaking the anchor chain or housing in that case. The problem with just trying to pull the thing out is it's extremely likely to cause a leak and then becomes even harder to move.
• kevinsundar 6y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_liquefaction
• msandford 6y ago
  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.
• jacob2484 6y ago
  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.
  • rossdavidh 6y ago
    We're kind of like physicists: https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/
    • divbzero 6y ago
      “Now consider a spherical ship…”
      • imtringued 6y ago
        I don't like the spherical cow meme because it misses the point. The assumption isn't that the cow is a sphere but rather that all cows have 4 legs, all cows give milk, there are lots of cows, etc. From a cursory glance these may look completely reasonable, until they aren't. Some cows injured their legs and can't walk. There are male "cows" that don't give milk. Sometimes there is only one cow. Meanwhile the spherical cow meme implies that there was never any truth to it in the first place. The complexity of life throws a wrench into everything.
  • Havoc 6y ago
    Yeah they flew in a 10 man team from Netherlands pretty much immediately
  • dahdum 6y ago
    Looks to me like everyone here is just having fun theorizing about it, I don’t see much, if any, real arrogance.
  • ngokevin 6y ago
    Better than the coronavirus takes I've seen from software devs...
• elif 6y ago
  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.
  • Denvercoder9 6y ago
    Digging a bypass is not a days problem, that's a years problem. Everything about this problem is massive. The shipping lane of the Suez canal is 20 m deep and 77 m wide. The maximum ship length is 400 m, so the turning radius required to get into the bypass is literally miles long.
    • cozzyd 6y ago
      It would be a lot shorter to "just" dig a canal in front of the ship and park it in there forever, but would still probably take too long.
• tomjohnneill 6y ago
  Site author here, I guess this is why the New York Times API keeps hitting rate limits.
  • float4 6y ago
    Cool! How much traffic are you handling at the moment / at peak?
    • tomjohnneill 6y ago
      I actually have no idea. It was just a bit of fun so I haven't got any logs/analytics set up at all.
  • markus_zhang 6y ago
    Interesting project. WOndering if you could write a blog about building that site.
    • tomjohnneill 6y ago
      I could, though it would be summarised in about one sentence: "NextJS and Vercel make everything stupidly easy."
      • markus_zhang 6y ago
        haha thanks man!
• Havoc 6y ago
  Surprised nobody has suggested blowing it up yet haha
• Black101 6y ago
  Get Elon's boring machines to dig in the right location(s) ...
• robmiller 6y ago
  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-given-evergreen-dick-ship https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqwn8/suez-canal-ms-ever-gi...
• highspeedbus 6y ago
  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.
• opsunit 6y ago
  On the same topic, this is an excellent read: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-seacowboys/ https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-seacowboys/
• boboche 6y ago
  Elon, we need you ;)
• oliv__ 6y ago
  Since it might takes weeks to clear the canal, can anyone here comment on the implications this will have on world trade?
• nickthemagicman 6y ago
  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.
• zabzonk 6y ago
  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.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  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.
  • jahewson 6y ago
    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).
    • ineedasername 6y ago
      I would still need N sites to ultimately resolve the specific room the keys are located it, and it would complicated my RSS feed because more than one would resolve to "yes". No, each room in my house must have its own sue & domain. Actually I would need more sites under that method: an 8 room house would need a site for each side of the 4/4 split, then another for each 2/2 split, then 1 for each room.
  • 205guy 6y ago
    The tile device works for members of my family who misplace their keys OR their phone: https://www.thetileapp.com/ https://www.thetileapp.com/
• nabakin 6y ago
  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.
  • kristofferR 6y ago
    It's using OpenLayers. https://openlayers.org/ https://openlayers.org/
    • nabakin 6y ago
      OpenLayers uses OSM. If you go to the VesselFinder website, you can see them give credit to OSM in that map and the OpenLayers website mentions they use OSM. Guess I should have mentioned OpenLayers too since it actually implements the map UI so ty.
      • SilverRed 6y ago
        OSM is primarily just a datasource. Different consumers of the data will have different UIs and performance.
• porjo 6y ago
  It was only a matter of time https://twitter.com/addiiceland/status/1374634903321649154 https://twitter.com/addiiceland/status/1374634903321649154
• fortran77 6y ago
  You'd think Elon would call the captain some awful names and then claim he can free it with his flamethrower and submarine!
• chovybizzass 6y ago
  can't they just add water to the anal canal?
• mallow 6y ago
  solution: Honk the fog horn until the sand vibrates away from the sound.
• bandyaboot 6y ago
  Has anyone checked the ship’s manifest? Maybe we’ll get lucky and find out it’s carrying 20,000 containers of thermite.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• hyperpallium2 6y ago
  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.
• stadium 6y ago
  What's the estimated economic impact of the blockage? Will other ships have to wait or is reroute even an option?
• CGamesPlay 6y ago
  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.
• intrasight 6y ago
  The movie rights should pay for some of the salvage costs
• etxm 6y ago
  You can also text for status: (586) 800-BOAT https://twitter.com/kelleyrobinson/status/1375199122433662982 https://twitter.com/kelleyrobinson/status/137519912243366298...
• johnnymontrose 6y ago
  Pulleys man. Millions and millions of pulleys. Such a magnificent system of pulleys that a 3 year old could pull it.
  • sn_master 6y ago
    Or hydraulic arms? such that a squirrel could pull it then.
• curmudgeon22 6y ago
  How does liability work in a situation like this? Can other shipping companies sue the at fault company for damages?
  • Caligatio 6y ago
    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.
• nickysielicki 6y ago
  I’d like to understand why this hasn’t happened before. What was special about this ship, this passage, etc.?
• throwawaybutwhy 6y ago
  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
  • movedx 6y ago
    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.
    • Mockapapella 6y ago
      When and where did they exist for a limited period of time? It never even occurred to me that this was an option
      • estaseuropano 6y ago
        Railways.
      • brian_cloutier 6y ago
        The first European joint-stock corporations were for single voyages. Everyone would band together and fund a ship to go somewhere, then split the earnings and dissolve the corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint-stock_company#Early_joint-stock_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint-stock_company#Early_join...
        • sneak 6y ago
          It's pretty much still like that now, except the last step is "go work for Google for a few years in golden handcuffs".
      • 6y ago
• jmpman 6y ago
  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.
• mseepgood 6y ago
  Why not send thousands of men with shovels? That's how canals were dug in the past.
• spindle 6y ago
  Just like Austin Powers: https://www.youtube.com/embed/IGiQOCX9UbM https://www.youtube.com/embed/IGiQOCX9UbM
  • fuzxi 6y ago
    No embeds here
    • spindle 6y ago
      Thank you. Luckily, the embed code I pasted shows the URL nice and clearly :-)
• edub 6y ago
  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.
• acd10j 6y ago
  Some of the news stories like this: https://nypost.com/2021/03/24/giant-container-ship-blocking-suez-canal-partially-moved/ https://nypost.com/2021/03/24/giant-container-ship-blocking-... are claiming that ship is partially free, what does it mean ? I am confused ....
  • tim333 6y ago
    I think there were some false reports. It's still stuck.
• wayanon 6y ago
  It’s refreshing to see a problem that’s easy to identify.
• siraben 6y ago
  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?
• beams 6y ago
  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.
  • Caligatio 6y ago
    If you can guarantee that the ship can be routinely filled to capacity, it's almost always economical to build the biggest ship you can. These things are often built to the maximum size that will fit into the canal that they transit. I thought I remember reading that this ship was designed to meet the Suez canal specs.
• sn_master 6y ago
  Where is Superman when you need one . They should make this part of the next movie.
• bythckr 6y ago
  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?
• Animats 6y ago
  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-dredging-company-does-not-yet-know-how-long-the-suez-canal-congestion-will-last.BkFFQIoq4d.html https://www.tellerreport.com/business/2021-03-26-the-dredgin...
• hoseja 6y ago
  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.
  • tim333 6y ago
    There has been some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal#Bypass_expansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal#Bypass_expansion $9bn in 2014
• sn_master 6y ago
  You can even text now to get its status https://twitter.com/kelleyrobinson/status/1375199122433662982 https://twitter.com/kelleyrobinson/status/137519912243366298...
• gesman 6y ago
  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?
• superjan 6y ago
  Who designed this critical piece of infrastructure with a single point of failure?
  • tim333 6y ago
    It's kind of evolved starting from the ancient canals of 500 BC or so. They've upgraded some of it to 2 parallel channels but not the bit the Ever Given is stuck in yet unfortunately.
  • CRConrad 6y ago
    It doesn't have "a single point of failure", it has infinite points of failure: Put a big ship on ground at any (infinitesimally adjacent, so infinite in number) point along the length of the canal, and it's blocked.
• dkdbejwi383 6y ago
  Has Elon Musk volunteered to fly out there with a portable submarine yet?
• anticristi 6y ago
  Not sure how much time it took to build the website, but I assume the author bets on a long shelf life. :)
• bronlund 6y ago
  Internet at it's best!
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• kyberias 6y ago
  Has anyone called Elon Musk yet?
  • hadora 6y ago
    i had to create an account to say that you made me chuckle. Thank you very much
• a9h74j 6y ago
  I know meta-posts are discouraged, but folks, you were supposed to be micro dosing.
• tilolebo 6y ago
  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!
  • tim333 6y ago
    The covid regs in Egypt are pretty relaxed if you want to give it a go.
• cycomanic 6y ago
  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.
  • ecf 6y ago
    > 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.
    • cycomanic 6y ago
      You are obviously correct (I'm not one myself), but I would suspect that we have a disproportionately high number of them compared to other type of engineers.
• jyriand 6y ago
  Archimedes would have a solution for this.
• markvdb 6y ago
  Build a bypass in the empty desert to the east of where the ship is stranded. Deal with getting this ship unstuck in parallel.
  • tim333 6y ago
    Might take a while.
• tejado 6y ago
  Can you implement an API for that? ;)
• maury91 6y ago
  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 )
  • tomerv 6y ago
    I actually don't understand why this isn't the best option right now. The east bank is mostly empty, and the channel is pretty shallow. You could probably construct a 1km detour within a few weeks with relatively low cost. Seems like a good way to hedge the bet of getting it unstuck.
    • DonCopal 6y ago
      > within a few weeks Haha, no. Just no.
      • tomerv 6y ago
        Do you have anything to base your skepticism on? The length of the whole canal is 200km and it took 10 years to build. I don't claim that it's exactly linear, but it sounds reasonable to assume a few weeks for just a 1km segment. The soil is soft and the canal isn't deep.
• PicassoCTs 6y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Administrative_Capital) and covid.
  • cleansy 6y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Authority#Revenues
• DocTomoe 6y ago
  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.
• milliams 6y ago
  They're missing the attribution to OpenStreetMap.
  • habi 6y ago
    It seems to me that this is more a problem of the embed from vesselfinder.com. I just noted this here: https://github.com/grischard/osm-lacking-attribution/issues/32 https://github.com/grischard/osm-lacking-attribution/issues/...
• testplzignore 6y ago
  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."
• richardfey 6y ago
  This sounds like a great "how ww3 started" intro story for a game
• richardfey 6y ago
  I wonder whether it has had an impact on drugs price in the streets
• jl6 6y ago
  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.
  • high_byte 6y ago
    very hard to measure. some goods like food expire. scary to think what about the livestock. other goods lose value due to delays, etc.
  • dan_hawkins 6y ago
    Some goods are perishable. Modern logistics can have very tight deadlines.
    • jl6 6y ago
      Perishable goods go by plane though. Containers are often held up in ports for weeks due to customs checks. I’d expect the vast majority of sea-shipped goods to be non-time-critical and unharmed by waiting for a couple of weeks.
      • dan_hawkins 6y ago
        I think you underestimate the volume of the perishable goods. Most are transported in containers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerated_container https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerated_container
• FartyMcFarter 6y ago
  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?
  • switch007 6y ago
    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.
• lucideer 6y ago
  > 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).
• bondarchuk 6y ago
  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 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.
• almostarockstar 6y ago
  Dig a bypass canal and leave the ship there.
• markus_zhang 6y ago
  Now just think how easy some terrorists can block the canal by just putting a hole in that sitting ship...
• lebuffon 6y ago
  This photo gives some perspective https://globalnews.ca/news/7719176/suez-canal-ship-digger-excavator-memes/ https://globalnews.ca/news/7719176/suez-canal-ship-digger-ex...
• gcanyon 6y ago
  One nuclear bomb could fix this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare Writing off the entire ship would cost far less than the delays cost in a day.
• engineer_22 6y ago
  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.
• lkebin 6y ago
  If fire a bomb from one side of ship, Does the wave can push out ship stuck ?
• Balgair 6y ago
  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-81ee2620d3c1 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.
• lurquer 6y ago
  My prediction: The ship isn’t going anywhere. It will need to be disassembled.
  • lurquer 6y ago
    Aaaand... that’s why nobody should heed my predictions...
• aleclarsoniv 6y ago
  How insane would it be to flood the area around the ship with levees?
• bruiseralmighty 6y ago
  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.
• interestica 6y ago
  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?
• fgaf33 6y ago
  This site lets you bet on when the ship will get unstuck from the Suez Canal. https://www.luxyachtsuites.com/predictionmarket https://www.luxyachtsuites.com/predictionmarket
• GoMonad 6y ago
  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?
• EricE 6y ago
  Between this and COVID maybe it's long overdue to rethink global JIT strategies?
• kerkouch 6y ago
  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.
• hellokittah 6y ago
  I find simple website extremely fascinating. Just answering one question Another similar one is http://www.isnasdaqopen.com/ http://www.isnasdaqopen.com/ This tells your if the stock market is open or not
• Naracion 6y ago
  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?