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It's still easier to dislodge a giant ship in one piece than it is to remove one giant ship's worth of random metal shrapnel from a narrow, shallow canal.

• thaumasiotes 6y ago
  Who said anything about shrapnel? There's another comment in the thread making the case that "we don't want to just tug harder on the boat, because that might tear a hole in the hull". That could destroy the boat, but... so what?
  • Denvercoder9 6y ago
    > That could destroy the boat, but... so what? Because then you'd still have to remove everything, but now you don't have one big, controllable system, but you have lots of pieces that will move in unpredictable ways. The canal is shallow and narrow, and gravity isn't working in your favor here. A ship has a natural tendency to float (even if it currently isn't). Pieces of debris don't. You will have to remove all pieces that break off, one-by-one.
  • chki 6y ago
    Because if you destroy the boat and it sinks that will make the passage unusable for a long time? I mean currently it seems possible to drag the ship out of this problem but if it's no longer floating you might need to start sawing it into pieces like this example of the sunken Tricolor https://youtu.be/0ENOJBLVgjw https://youtu.be/0ENOJBLVgjw . That will take months and will have a serious global economic impact.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]