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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 jus

by rtkwe 6y ago

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...

withinboredom 6y ago
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.
- danielheath 6y ago
  There's no shortage of nearby desert not being used for anything else.
  - lhorie 6y ago
    But the final goal is to put the containers back on the ship after it gets unstuck, no? I imagine the point of the containers being on the ship in the first place is that there are not enough trucks on land to get the containers off the desert to their destinations.
    - danielheath 6y ago
      Right now the goal is to unblock the canal; if the entire cargo were lost in the process, that would be expensive, but I'm not confident it'd be more expensive than blocking shipping through for an extra fortnight.
      - nerfhammer 6y ago
        it follows then that we should consider blowing up the ship
        yellowapple 6y ago
        I suspect that might very well be on the table. Hell, a big enough explosion might prevent ships from ever getting stuck at that spot again.
        lifeformed 6y ago
        And you could recoup the costs by selling tickets to watch the explosion.
      - GekkePrutser 6y ago
        @nerfhammer: Great idea, littering the canal with sharp debris pieces so the next ships will be torn to shreds :)
        Scoundreller 6y ago
        Dredging is the easy part. Not sure how much swimming happens in the canal. We only have to worry about cutting through steel, not skin.
        vkou 6y ago
        Ships traveling at 7 knots over a minefield of sunken containers will happily shred their steel skin.
        WindyLakeReturn 6y ago
        It sounded like they were intended to drop them on land, where one would hope no ships would be hitting them. 'Lost' would be referring to the likely chance that once put on the desert they wouldn't be retrieved.
    - scoopertrooper 6y ago
      Ideally, but the value of whatever cargo is on the ship is worth less than a functioning global supply chain. How the insurance would be settled would be interesting, I suppose it'd be the same as though the cargo was blown overboard.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  The ship isn't floating though, that's the problem. But I'd imagine it's very stable when trying to lift stuff of due to it being stuck.
lhorie 6y ago
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.
- rtpg 6y ago
  I mean the boat is located 90 minutes from Cairo. It’s not easy but Cairo has skyscrapers and a construction industry. Of course there is the “what is physically possible” and “what is politically doable” and there maybe a bit of a gulf there.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    I mean, heavy-lifting choppers are something that I'd also expect the average NATO or (former) Warsaw Pact nation to have, and it's arguably in their best interests to make sure a key shipping route is operational (and in Egypt's best interests to accept any help possible). Hell, Israel's close by, and I'm pretty sure they've got this sort of airpower in droves and are probably pretty heavily reliant on the Suez Canal; maybe instead of fighting with Egypt the Israelis could, say, pitch in and foster some good will? And further, it'll make up for the time when fighting between the two countries caused a Suez Canal blockage ;)
    - lhorie 6y ago
      I mean, physical existence of a chopper vs its viability for this specific operation are very different things. Think of it this way: you may have a car, and you may even be familiar with installing and maneuvering a standard size tow. But that doesn't mean that I can just ask you out of the blue to come over and tow a prefab house that you've never handled before, then ask you to do it again a dozen times over (and on the double), and expect everything to go peachy.
rdiddly 6y ago
Yep. Throw a bunch of these and a bunch of fossil fuels at the problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_S-64_Skycrane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_S-64_Skycrane
- knz 6y ago
  There are comments further down explaining how the containers likely weigh substantially more than the lift capacity of heavy lift helicopters. They'd have to partially unload the contents of each individual container first. And if you're unloading, the human labor cost to unload the whole container is probably cheaper than the cost of running a fleet of helicopters for weeks to months.
  - gbin 6y ago
    Or just blowing it up and push the pieces to the sides I would guess...
    - theshrike79 6y ago
      I like the way you think. I'd buy a plane ticket to Suez to see that. Or even pay for a proper 4k stream of the event.
    - avereveard 6y ago
      Build a pyramid on top and let scavengers do their thing
      - Cass 6y ago
        I like this scavengers idea. How far is it to Cairo, and what's unemployment like after Corona killed the tourism industy? Unlock all the containers, tell people you're paying them fifteen bucks an hour to come unload, AND they get to keep whatever they can carry off. How many people can you fit on that ship at once?
  - sn_master 6y ago
    The Skycrane helicopter that OP referred to is a true beast. It can lift heavy tanks and intact electricity towers. I won't be surprised if it gets used to lift the containers one-by-one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDQrUiCd61U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDQrUiCd61U
avidiax 6y ago
I suspect something more like they drop the containers in the desert. The value of the goods is irrelevant in the face of cutting off Europe from Asia.
vanviegen 6y ago
It seems that containers may be too heavy. The most powerful chopper (the M-26) lifts up to 20,000kg (with most heavy-lift choppers probably lifting about half that), while some containers may wel exceed 30,000kg.
- souprock 6y ago
  Wikipedia says: As of 2016, the Mi-26 still holds the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale world record for the greatest mass lifted by a helicopter to 2,000 metres (6,562 ft) – 56,768.8 kilograms (125,000 lb) on a flight in 1982. That is 56.8 to 62.5 tons, depending on the type of ton. Lift two containers at once. Making things even easier, the shipping company knows the position and weight of every container. The containers have been carefully placed, keeping the weight low and spread evenly. The containers on top are the low-weight ones.
  - vanviegen 6y ago
    Two paragraphs earlier, Wikipedia states "the Mi-26 has a payload of up to 20 tonnes (44,000 lb)". Exceeding the documented maximum payload by almost a factor of 3 sounds like an excessive amount of overengineering, even by software standards. :-) You're right that most of the heaviest containers would be at the bottom of the stack. That's kind of a mixed blessing though..
  - overscore 6y ago
    That's at the max takeoff weight (56,000kg), including the weight of the helicopter, fuel, crew, etc. Depending on the temperature as the site, that could be a lot lower.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
perlgeek 6y ago
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).
- andi999 6y ago
  The fundamental problem/flaw with that was when dropping off something you needed to somehow get a dummy load to not float away. (releasing the helium is not an option due to economical reasons)
chaps 6y ago
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?
- Yizahi 6y ago
  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).
  - overscore 6y ago
    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.
    - chaps 6y ago
      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)
pacman2 6y ago
"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 a" I thought about this. I don't think a chopper can lift the container. Depending on the size of the containers, even the biggest chopper might not be enough https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-mi-26-helicopter-llft-biggest-2016-8?r=DE&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-mi-26-helicopter-llft... Get the ship moving again, I think if you pull too hard, it may fall apart. There is no infrastructure to unload it. Gut feeling: Mount a crane on a ship and start unloading it to a smaller ship.
- SenHeng 6y ago
  There's the crane lifting a crane lifting a crane method. [0] Though I suspect another problem would be getting another ship large enough for all those cranes and strong enough to support all the weight close enough to the ship without them damaging each other by knocking into each other from waves and weight movement. I also forgot about the matter of transporting those giant cranes onto the site. That itself would probably take weeks. [0]https://www.constructionjunkie.com/blog/2015/8/9/watch-a-construction-crane-lift-a-crane-thats-lifting-a-third-crane-thats-lifting-a-fourth-crane https://www.constructionjunkie.com/blog/2015/8/9/watch-a-con...
  - pacman2 6y ago
    "Though I suspect another problem would be getting another ship large enough for all those cranes and strong enough to support all the weight close enough to the ship without them damaging each other by knocking into each other from waves and weight movement." I don't thinks this is your concern. Desperate times, desperate measures. Likely you would fix/attach the crane ship to the container ship. I am sure they are willing to salvage two ships at this time. The daily losses must be gigantic.

by rtkwe 6y ago

withinboredom 6y ago

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.

danielheath 6y ago
There's no shortage of nearby desert not being used for anything else.
- lhorie 6y ago
  But the final goal is to put the containers back on the ship after it gets unstuck, no? I imagine the point of the containers being on the ship in the first place is that there are not enough trucks on land to get the containers off the desert to their destinations.
  - danielheath 6y ago
    Right now the goal is to unblock the canal; if the entire cargo were lost in the process, that would be expensive, but I'm not confident it'd be more expensive than blocking shipping through for an extra fortnight.
    - nerfhammer 6y ago
      it follows then that we should consider blowing up the ship
      - yellowapple 6y ago
        I suspect that might very well be on the table. Hell, a big enough explosion might prevent ships from ever getting stuck at that spot again.
        lifeformed 6y ago
        And you could recoup the costs by selling tickets to watch the explosion.
    - GekkePrutser 6y ago
      @nerfhammer: Great idea, littering the canal with sharp debris pieces so the next ships will be torn to shreds :)
      - Scoundreller 6y ago
        Dredging is the easy part. Not sure how much swimming happens in the canal. We only have to worry about cutting through steel, not skin.
        vkou 6y ago
        Ships traveling at 7 knots over a minefield of sunken containers will happily shred their steel skin.
      - WindyLakeReturn 6y ago
        It sounded like they were intended to drop them on land, where one would hope no ships would be hitting them. 'Lost' would be referring to the likely chance that once put on the desert they wouldn't be retrieved.
  - scoopertrooper 6y ago
    Ideally, but the value of whatever cargo is on the ship is worth less than a functioning global supply chain. How the insurance would be settled would be interesting, I suppose it'd be the same as though the cargo was blown overboard.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
The ship isn't floating though, that's the problem. But I'd imagine it's very stable when trying to lift stuff of due to it being stuck.

lhorie 6y ago

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.

rtpg 6y ago
I mean the boat is located 90 minutes from Cairo. It’s not easy but Cairo has skyscrapers and a construction industry. Of course there is the “what is physically possible” and “what is politically doable” and there maybe a bit of a gulf there.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  I mean, heavy-lifting choppers are something that I'd also expect the average NATO or (former) Warsaw Pact nation to have, and it's arguably in their best interests to make sure a key shipping route is operational (and in Egypt's best interests to accept any help possible). Hell, Israel's close by, and I'm pretty sure they've got this sort of airpower in droves and are probably pretty heavily reliant on the Suez Canal; maybe instead of fighting with Egypt the Israelis could, say, pitch in and foster some good will? And further, it'll make up for the time when fighting between the two countries caused a Suez Canal blockage ;)
  - lhorie 6y ago
    I mean, physical existence of a chopper vs its viability for this specific operation are very different things. Think of it this way: you may have a car, and you may even be familiar with installing and maneuvering a standard size tow. But that doesn't mean that I can just ask you out of the blue to come over and tow a prefab house that you've never handled before, then ask you to do it again a dozen times over (and on the double), and expect everything to go peachy.

rdiddly 6y ago

Yep. Throw a bunch of these and a bunch of fossil fuels at the problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_S-64_Skycrane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_S-64_Skycrane

knz 6y ago
There are comments further down explaining how the containers likely weigh substantially more than the lift capacity of heavy lift helicopters. They'd have to partially unload the contents of each individual container first. And if you're unloading, the human labor cost to unload the whole container is probably cheaper than the cost of running a fleet of helicopters for weeks to months.
- gbin 6y ago
  Or just blowing it up and push the pieces to the sides I would guess...
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    I like the way you think. I'd buy a plane ticket to Suez to see that. Or even pay for a proper 4k stream of the event.
  - avereveard 6y ago
    Build a pyramid on top and let scavengers do their thing
    - Cass 6y ago
      I like this scavengers idea. How far is it to Cairo, and what's unemployment like after Corona killed the tourism industy? Unlock all the containers, tell people you're paying them fifteen bucks an hour to come unload, AND they get to keep whatever they can carry off. How many people can you fit on that ship at once?
- sn_master 6y ago
  The Skycrane helicopter that OP referred to is a true beast. It can lift heavy tanks and intact electricity towers. I won't be surprised if it gets used to lift the containers one-by-one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDQrUiCd61U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDQrUiCd61U

avidiax 6y ago

I suspect something more like they drop the containers in the desert. The value of the goods is irrelevant in the face of cutting off Europe from Asia.

vanviegen 6y ago

It seems that containers may be too heavy. The most powerful chopper (the M-26) lifts up to 20,000kg (with most heavy-lift choppers probably lifting about half that), while some containers may wel exceed 30,000kg.

souprock 6y ago
Wikipedia says: As of 2016, the Mi-26 still holds the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale world record for the greatest mass lifted by a helicopter to 2,000 metres (6,562 ft) – 56,768.8 kilograms (125,000 lb) on a flight in 1982. That is 56.8 to 62.5 tons, depending on the type of ton. Lift two containers at once. Making things even easier, the shipping company knows the position and weight of every container. The containers have been carefully placed, keeping the weight low and spread evenly. The containers on top are the low-weight ones.
- vanviegen 6y ago
  Two paragraphs earlier, Wikipedia states "the Mi-26 has a payload of up to 20 tonnes (44,000 lb)". Exceeding the documented maximum payload by almost a factor of 3 sounds like an excessive amount of overengineering, even by software standards. :-) You're right that most of the heaviest containers would be at the bottom of the stack. That's kind of a mixed blessing though..
- overscore 6y ago
  That's at the max takeoff weight (56,000kg), including the weight of the helicopter, fuel, crew, etc. Depending on the temperature as the site, that could be a lot lower.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

perlgeek 6y ago

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).

andi999 6y ago
The fundamental problem/flaw with that was when dropping off something you needed to somehow get a dummy load to not float away. (releasing the helium is not an option due to economical reasons)

chaps 6y ago

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?

Yizahi 6y ago
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).
- overscore 6y ago
  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.
  - chaps 6y ago
    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)

pacman2 6y ago

"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 a" I thought about this. I don't think a chopper can lift the container. Depending on the size of the containers, even the biggest chopper might not be enough https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-mi-26-helicopter-llft-biggest-2016-8?r=DE&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-mi-26-helicopter-llft... Get the ship moving again, I think if you pull too hard, it may fall apart. There is no infrastructure to unload it. Gut feeling: Mount a crane on a ship and start unloading it to a smaller ship.

SenHeng 6y ago
There's the crane lifting a crane lifting a crane method. [0] Though I suspect another problem would be getting another ship large enough for all those cranes and strong enough to support all the weight close enough to the ship without them damaging each other by knocking into each other from waves and weight movement. I also forgot about the matter of transporting those giant cranes onto the site. That itself would probably take weeks. [0]https://www.constructionjunkie.com/blog/2015/8/9/watch-a-construction-crane-lift-a-crane-thats-lifting-a-third-crane-thats-lifting-a-fourth-crane https://www.constructionjunkie.com/blog/2015/8/9/watch-a-con...
- pacman2 6y ago
  "Though I suspect another problem would be getting another ship large enough for all those cranes and strong enough to support all the weight close enough to the ship without them damaging each other by knocking into each other from waves and weight movement." I don't thinks this is your concern. Desperate times, desperate measures. Likely you would fix/attach the crane ship to the container ship. I am sure they are willing to salvage two ships at this time. The daily losses must be gigantic.