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This is a really good example of how terrible people are at judging scale. Some numbers getting thrown around downthread say there's something to the tune of 10
This is a really good example of how terrible people are at judging scale. Some numbers getting thrown around downthread say there's something to the tune of 10,000 40ft containers. To give a bit of a sense of perspective, that's like trying to clear out some 200 football fields worth of semi-trucks, except they are stacked, packed full of stuff, and have no gas or wheels. And all of them are perched atop a ship that is twice as tall and there's no suitable cranes or similar equipment anywhere near the vicinity.
If you ever seen a truck up close, you probably have an idea how tricky it is to maneuver even a single functional one on open flat ground. I can't even begin to imagine what it would take to move off even a fraction of 10,000 equivalents of bricks of the size of trucks, let alone budge the massive ship off of the sand banks.
All true, though I imagine the plan is unloading only some of the containers in conjunction with dredging, pumping out fuel, etc. Still huge scale, but I imagine getting just one of the ends out of the sand would open up more options.
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For moving containers off the best bet would probably be heavy lift choppers, the ship is large enough you could have several working on it at once and then just drop them off nearby to be loaded onto barges or something. A huge undertaking but it any weight taken off the Evergreen is less digging they have to do and the time is so expensive.
Also it's less middle of nowhere there's a pretty large airbase nearby it looks like from Google Maps and a second smaller airport south of where Evergreen got stuck so there's plenty of support near.
https://www.google.com/maps/@30.3371843,32.2798365,3799m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@30.3371843,32.2798365,3799m/dat...
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.
What if they retrofitted the propeller as a winch and connected a steel cable?
Another reference is that the ship is as long as the empire state building is tall.
It looks like the people that freed the ship yesterday were not that bad at estimating scale.
I'm definitely curious to see what they end up using. If the solution ends up involving choppers, there's obviously the question of tensile load specs for all the involved parts (the chopper itself, the cables, the containers, wind considerations, etc). I don't imagine they would have enough equipment with sufficiently large specs just laying around in case of an emergency like this, especially on such a large scale (recall we're talking about airlifting truck-sized loads, possibly numbering in the hundreds or even thousands), and it's not clear to me what kinds of forces the choppers are designed to withstand, especially if we consider lateral forces due to wind or container geometry or whatever.
Ha, in the late 90s/early 00s, there was some buzz in Germany about building a huge freight airship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter
They went bankrupt, which is kinda sad. It had a designed lift capacity of 160t, so could theoretically lift several containers at once, given the right harness.
(Of course I have no idea if it would be have been practical to use it to unload the containers, but the idea is certainly intriguing).
Like the OP said, folks really aren't understanding the scale of this problem.. If they manage to do a single crate per minute, that's still just under seven days to do them all.
An empty forty foot shipping container on its own weighs about four tons and their max supported weight is 33.5 tons, so the problem is somewhere in between for every single container. A Mi-26 helicopter, a "heavy transport helicopter" can only lift 14.5 tons, so there will be crates that can't be lifted.
Even if it was possible, and ignoring the logistical issues, you can't ignore the safety issues. Doing it quickly across seven days is going to lead to human and equipment failure, and somebody's bound to get hurt or killed. Considering how many eyes are on this right now, what do you think is going to happen the first time someone dies?
And one per minute is wildly optimistic. I guess it would be more like 20 minutes per container, which will result in a year of offloading 24/7, which is also impossible due to low resource time of helicopter engines and airframe in general (and pilot stress too).
From my experience working with helicopters in the military, I think that is wildly optimistic. Probably closer to 60-240 minutes to get each container even 100m by helicopter, with severe limits to parallel operations either in the air, or on the ground/water nearby.
Yeah, and it sounds like they can't fly that long without parts failure. It's hard to find thorough information on how long heavy lift helicopters can run for, but a new CH-54K only has an 88.6% reliability rate for missions lasting only 2.25 hours. Shit's looking bad for the helicopter idea.
However, the current estimate for mission reliability is still below the required threshold (i.e., minimally acceptable) requirement. The program office reported in November 2020 that the helicopter demonstrated an 84.5 percent reliability rate, which is short of the program’s threshold requirement and below where the program office expected the reliability to be at this point in development.15 The program office projects that the helicopter should reach mission reliability of 88.6 percent after operational testing.16 According to program officials, the main causes of the reliability shortfalls have been technical issues identified during developmental testing. For example, the reliability of the main gearbox has been one of the main factors affecting the helicopter’s overall mission reliability metric.17 As mentioned, the program office has mitigation plans in place to address many of those technical issues, but has not yet demonstrated the required level of overall helicopter mission reliability.
Source: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-208.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-208.pdf (p13/14)
As for the weight per container issue, I would expect the heavier container to be further down in the stack, for centre of gravity considerations, e.g. you should still be able to get a significant part of the load off the ship.
If you can get 10% of the weight down in a week, that is still better than not having the 10% gone. If you can do the helicopter offloading without blocking any other progress, then why not do it immediately?
Uh, that's worse than I expected. The Egyptian Air Force has some Mil Mi-6, but their max slung load seems to be 8 tons according to Wikipedia.
> Considering how many eyes are on this right now, what do you think is going to happen the first time someone dies?
Considering how many goods and how much money is being blocked up by this the response may be loud from come parties but I doubt governments will care enough to stop it.
Some estimates I saw put the estimate at 10 billion dollars of goods being held up by the jammed ship and the costs of delays caused by sailing around the Cape instead will probably put a multiple on to that number before this is all over. There are construction projects in that corner of the globe worth far less that kill far more than just a few people but that hasn't really slowed them down much has it?
The difference would be in the hyper-visibility of the deaths.
To show what I mean, compare the level of reporting and political backlash from [1], involving two construction workers against [2], involving 11 other deaths, that were only revealed after an audit. Visibility matters. I don't think it's unfair to say that if any deaths happen here that there would be far more global visibility than [1].
And besides, it's a silly armchair idea that doesn't make any sense whatsoever after ten minutes of scrutiny.
[1] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/rio-cycle-path-collapse-ra7ises-co7ncerns-o7ver/ https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/rio-cycle-path...
[2] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/rio-olympic-death-toll-hits-11-ma7rch-a7udit-sa7ys/ https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/rio-olympic-de...
From a system design perspective, it's kind of nuts that the entire planet has only one single canal connecting two major bodies of water, and it's in a country with a, shall we say, precarious government. Surely such a single point of failure is a massive risk. Granted, geography doesn't leave us many choices, but could we at least build another, parallel canal to it?
This also assumes good weather. Part of what caused the ship to run aground was high winds. I imagine that any winds high enough to cause that would also make it impossible to use the helicopters. How often are the winds in that area that high in that area?
The people that freed the ship yesterday were apparently not bad at all at estimating scale.
> Average expected teu is 30k lbs on a ship
Yeah, average. That doesn't mean that every container - or even most containers - are loaded to that weight per TEU. Indeed, it's highly likely that they're not; the heavy containers are going to be toward the bottom, and the lighter containers are going to be toward the top. And there are probably a lot more light containers than heavy ones, because...
> Nearly all containers are packed to the brim
Volumetrically, yes. Not necessarily in terms of weight. Indeed, unless you're shipping gold ingots or something, "max goods shipped" necessarily means that you're more likely to run into volumetric limits first.
Not to mention that the max container weight in practice is usually a fair bit lower than the ISO spec, since those containers have to get to their destination - which means traveling on roads and railways with their own weight limits (both for the whole vehicle and per-axle), and on vehicles that themselves are part of that limit (and themselves have limits of their own). And further, a container can only have so much weight stacked on top of it.
> Real life is not pleasant to armchair theory.
Indeed it is not, which is why when it comes to the containers themselves I'm speaking from experience as a professional in the supply chain / logistics field :)
(But yes, admittedly my knowledge on military helicopters is less substantial, so if there's someone who's not an armchair theorist on that topic who wants to chime in, that'd be most welcome)
But do they actually routinely haul shipping containers packed to the brim? And continuously for days on end? There are various people in this thread saying that they can't, either because the specs are not up to par or because the stress risks rapid/early mechanical failure.
Also, while we're at it w/ terrible analogies, consider that many people (including the CEO of the company that got called to clean up this mess) are saying this is going to take weeks. The more accurate analogy is that your F-650 is a dozen tugboats, the truck is not blocking the road, but instead sunk in a marsh an hour away from town (the suez sand bank), loaded w/ 10,000 50lb lead anvils (the containers) and all the manpower you are able to summon in order to move those anvils are a dozen highly paid software engineers (the choppers) who may or may not be inclined to take a week off to help you move the anvils off the truck, and who may or may not be actually physically capable of helping even if they wanted to spend their week hauling hundreds of 50lb anvils by hand. Oh, and you can't just drop anvils in the marsh either, even by accident, due to the risk of poisoning the water supply for the town. And you can't rule out the risk of one of the software engineers tripping and drowning. And you're not even sure your F-650 can pull the truck out without tumbling it on its side or yanking off the front axle even if you empty it out completely.