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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

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.
- dageshi 6y ago
  Are there helicopters capable of lifting a fully loaded cargo container?
  - Baeocystin 6y ago
    No. The absolute heaviest-lift helicopter, the MI-26, can lift a little over 20 short tons. Most helicopters can carry a ton or two at most. In comparison, unloaded shipping containers are already a few tons. Loaded ones are all over the place, of course, but max out at around 30.
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    In addition to the weight issues, there are up to 20k of them on board.
- karagenit 6y ago
  Not sure if that's possible. Some quick Googling told me a typical 40' cargo container has a capacity of 30 tons, but the largest commercial cargo helicopter (the Mi-26) can carry only 22 tons.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  It has something like 20000 containers on it. Even if helicopters would lift a container off every 10 minutes, it wouldn't make any meaningful difference. Also, you can't do the maneuvering they were trying to with the tugs at the same time you're doing something like that, unless you want to kill someone. Unloading such a ship to empty would take a long time even if it's in port facilities under many cranes.
- dghlsakjg 6y ago
  The worlds highest capacity heavy lift helicopter can lift 44k lbs (russian M-26, estimated to be 20 in working condition). An empty 40 ft. container weighs 9k lbs. With a max loading of 66k lbs gross. The Ever Given has a capacity of 20k TEU, or 10k 40 ft. containers. Being generous, you could move maybe 5 per hour. Probably 1 per hour would be realistic. But give them the benefit of the doubt and say they could move 20 per hour for some reason, including fuel and maintenance stops. So assuming that they could work 24 hours per day, they could do 480 containers per day (again assuming that all of the containers are 22k lbs lighter than capacity). They should be able to get this helicopter unloading done in 20 days of around the clock work with a bunch of highly optimistic assumptions. Plus they have to stay out of the way of the dozens of salvage workers trying to move the actual ship, while operating a soviet era machine in a VERY harsh desert environment with no infrastructure. If they need the ship to float higher, they would start by removing ballast, fuel, crew water, etc. Large salvage operations are notoriously expensive, tricky, dangerous, and often don't make sense to outsiders. There's a reason that there's really only about half a dozen firms worldwide that have the expertise and equipment to pull something like this off.
- _carbyau_ 6y ago
  I don't know the specifics of this one ship, but I thought container ships had hundreds, if not thousands of containers.
p1mrx 6y ago
"The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of container blubber fell everywhere."
- frozenlettuce 6y ago
  "the blast blew blubber beyond any believe boundaries"
  - stragies 6y ago
    The original source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPuaSY0cMK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPuaSY0cMK8
Denvercoder9 6y ago
Brute force won't really help here, as the ship does not have the structural integrity to resist the force rocket engines would exert on it. Breaking the ship up would be catastrophic, as clean-up of many pieces would take a lot longer than getting it unstuck.
- jart 6y ago
  Nuking the Suez canal was a better proposal than using the rocket boosters. The most important artery in the world is blocked right now and you're concerned about clean-up work? It's the desert!
  - Denvercoder9 6y ago
    I'm concerned about the clean-up work of the pieces that end up in the canal. The canal is pretty tight, there's not much space for debris in it without blocking it.
tehjoker 6y ago
I like how everyone thinks that by using money, bombs, or radiation they can fix a carefully engineered project by essentially kicking it hard enough. Blowing a messy radioactive hole in the ground does not guarantee maritime navigability....
- gm3dmo 6y ago
  This is Hacker News.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
Egypt is losing transit fees. A typical bulk carrier pays about $200,000 per transit. 51 ships transit the canal each day, on average. Egypt is losing $10m per day. Edit: the canal generated $5.85billion in revenue in 2018, or $16million per day. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-egypt-economy-suezcanal-idUKKBN1JD0AF https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-egypt-economy-suezcanal-i...
- yitchelle 6y ago
  Egypt could claim the lost fees from the ship owner, maybe?
riffraff 6y ago
> Egypt is losing 400million in trade every hour this seems excessive, if they made 400M in trade per hour that would be 3T per year, but Egypt's GDP is ~1T.
suresk 6y ago
The ship weighs over 400 million lbs. Falcon Heavy has something like 5 million lbs of thrust at takeoff, but then each Falcon Heavy adds some weight. I'm not sure what type of fuel load it would need to lift something a few feet and drop it somewhere else? But you're probably going to need several hundred Falcon Heavys to move this ship. Then you have to attach them all to the ship somehow? Hopefully all of the rocket exhaust doesn't blow a bunch of containers around or melt the ship or anything. Then I guess hope that the ship has been engineered for a scenario where rockets are used to move it so that it doesn't come apart? Sure, I can't imagine why all of that wouldn't take more than a few days. If you mean using rockets to basically pull really hard on the ship and yank it out of the bank, then that's a little different - you still need several really big ones, but you can probably rip the ship apart just the same and make the problem 10x worse without quite as much effort.

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.
dageshi 6y ago
Are there helicopters capable of lifting a fully loaded cargo container?
- Baeocystin 6y ago
  No. The absolute heaviest-lift helicopter, the MI-26, can lift a little over 20 short tons. Most helicopters can carry a ton or two at most. In comparison, unloaded shipping containers are already a few tons. Loaded ones are all over the place, of course, but max out at around 30.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  In addition to the weight issues, there are up to 20k of them on board.
karagenit 6y ago
Not sure if that's possible. Some quick Googling told me a typical 40' cargo container has a capacity of 30 tons, but the largest commercial cargo helicopter (the Mi-26) can carry only 22 tons.
PeterisP 6y ago
It has something like 20000 containers on it. Even if helicopters would lift a container off every 10 minutes, it wouldn't make any meaningful difference. Also, you can't do the maneuvering they were trying to with the tugs at the same time you're doing something like that, unless you want to kill someone. Unloading such a ship to empty would take a long time even if it's in port facilities under many cranes.
dghlsakjg 6y ago
The worlds highest capacity heavy lift helicopter can lift 44k lbs (russian M-26, estimated to be 20 in working condition). An empty 40 ft. container weighs 9k lbs. With a max loading of 66k lbs gross. The Ever Given has a capacity of 20k TEU, or 10k 40 ft. containers. Being generous, you could move maybe 5 per hour. Probably 1 per hour would be realistic. But give them the benefit of the doubt and say they could move 20 per hour for some reason, including fuel and maintenance stops. So assuming that they could work 24 hours per day, they could do 480 containers per day (again assuming that all of the containers are 22k lbs lighter than capacity). They should be able to get this helicopter unloading done in 20 days of around the clock work with a bunch of highly optimistic assumptions. Plus they have to stay out of the way of the dozens of salvage workers trying to move the actual ship, while operating a soviet era machine in a VERY harsh desert environment with no infrastructure. If they need the ship to float higher, they would start by removing ballast, fuel, crew water, etc. Large salvage operations are notoriously expensive, tricky, dangerous, and often don't make sense to outsiders. There's a reason that there's really only about half a dozen firms worldwide that have the expertise and equipment to pull something like this off.
_carbyau_ 6y ago
I don't know the specifics of this one ship, but I thought container ships had hundreds, if not thousands of containers.

p1mrx 6y ago

"The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of container blubber fell everywhere."

frozenlettuce 6y ago
"the blast blew blubber beyond any believe boundaries"
- stragies 6y ago
  The original source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPuaSY0cMK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPuaSY0cMK8

Denvercoder9 6y ago

Brute force won't really help here, as the ship does not have the structural integrity to resist the force rocket engines would exert on it. Breaking the ship up would be catastrophic, as clean-up of many pieces would take a lot longer than getting it unstuck.

jart 6y ago
Nuking the Suez canal was a better proposal than using the rocket boosters. The most important artery in the world is blocked right now and you're concerned about clean-up work? It's the desert!
- Denvercoder9 6y ago
  I'm concerned about the clean-up work of the pieces that end up in the canal. The canal is pretty tight, there's not much space for debris in it without blocking it.

tehjoker 6y ago

I like how everyone thinks that by using money, bombs, or radiation they can fix a carefully engineered project by essentially kicking it hard enough. Blowing a messy radioactive hole in the ground does not guarantee maritime navigability....

gm3dmo 6y ago
This is Hacker News.

ArkanExplorer 6y ago

Egypt is losing transit fees. A typical bulk carrier pays about $200,000 per transit. 51 ships transit the canal each day, on average. Egypt is losing $10m per day. Edit: the canal generated $5.85billion in revenue in 2018, or $16million per day. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-egypt-economy-suezcanal-idUKKBN1JD0AF https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-egypt-economy-suezcanal-i...

yitchelle 6y ago
Egypt could claim the lost fees from the ship owner, maybe?

riffraff 6y ago

> Egypt is losing 400million in trade every hour this seems excessive, if they made 400M in trade per hour that would be 3T per year, but Egypt's GDP is ~1T.

suresk 6y ago

The ship weighs over 400 million lbs. Falcon Heavy has something like 5 million lbs of thrust at takeoff, but then each Falcon Heavy adds some weight. I'm not sure what type of fuel load it would need to lift something a few feet and drop it somewhere else? But you're probably going to need several hundred Falcon Heavys to move this ship. Then you have to attach them all to the ship somehow? Hopefully all of the rocket exhaust doesn't blow a bunch of containers around or melt the ship or anything. Then I guess hope that the ship has been engineered for a scenario where rockets are used to move it so that it doesn't come apart? Sure, I can't imagine why all of that wouldn't take more than a few days. If you mean using rockets to basically pull really hard on the ship and yank it out of the bank, then that's a little different - you still need several really big ones, but you can probably rip the ship apart just the same and make the problem 10x worse without quite as much effort.