10 ms·

How to Squeeze a Huge Ship Down a Tiny River

112 points by sveme 12y ago

jhallenworld 12y ago
The article reminds me of the "fitting a ladder around a corner" problem that I saw in numerical analysis class years ago. Expanded forms of this problem include the food trolley and sofa problems... take a look at http://www.researchgate.net/publication/220154823_Moving_a_Food_Trolley_Around_a_Corner/links/0deec528ccc410c9cf000000 http://www.researchgate.net/publication/220154823_Moving_a_F...
johnohara 12y ago
“Everything is unusual on this trip,” says Bernard Meyer, managing partner of the firm. Meyer is the great-great-great-grandson of Willm Rolf Meyer. He founded the company in 1795, choosing a spot in Papenburg so construction projects would be safe from storms. In his wildest dreams, I doubt Willm Rolf Meyer could have ever imagined this as a legacy. Or that his family business would survive 219 years and apply its experience this way. Remarkable.
- junto 12y ago
  I assume that this firm counts as one of the German "Mittelstand". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand
  - johnohara 12y ago
    Interesting read. Thank you for posting it.
RyanMcGreal 12y ago
> a full moon (or no moon) is ideal to ensure the water was at its deepest. Here's a fun word: syzygy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syzygy_(astronomy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syzygy_(astronomy)
- xenophonf 12y ago
  That's odd. I typed it in and nothing happened.
  - emjaygee 12y ago
    You have to type it three times.
IanDrake 12y ago
>It is a beast of a ship, 1,141 feet long with room for more than 4,000 passengers "I want to be crammed on a ship with 4,000 other people" said no one ever. I wonder how these cruise ships make money between the cost of fuel, food, and expensive mishaps.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  With all the decks, it's likely roughly as much square footage per person as a mall or a resort.
  - mcguire 12y ago
    Judging from my experience on a cruise several years ago, the only major issues are arriving on/leaving the ship in port (and they somehow managed that process so that it wasn't that big of a deal) and scheduling dinner in the evening (there were two or three seatings and, by god, you had to be there on time).
- Fomite 12y ago
  Shipping is massively fuel efficient, and enjoys economies of scale Food is built into the cost of the cruise itself. Mishaps are insured, and relatively rare. Insuring ships is a very old industry.
  - IanDrake 12y ago
    >Shipping is massively fuel efficient That's interesting. >Mishaps are insured The cost I was thinking of was the bad PR. Ships running aground with people dying, mass strandings at sea with people living in squalor unable to flush toilets, and general sickness run wild.
    - Fomite 12y ago
      Ships and trains are the most fuel efficient ways to transport things - and things include people. In terms of the bad PR, I confess I'm biased - I'm an epidemiologist, with a fondness for GI infections, so norovirus is near and dear to my heart. But cruises have good marketing, the failures like that are relatively rare on a mass scale, and it's a cheap vacation that feels like luxury to people.
ColinWright 12y ago
I once assisted getting a barge into a port. Technically it was a barge, because it didn't have its own engines, but it was an FPSO[0] and it was 310 metres long and 80 metres wide - you could fit three football fields in its footprint. My job was to provide real-time live radar from the land-based VTS[1]. It had been decided that only relying on GPS was a risk, and that independent radar images would be necessary to confirm position, course, and speed. We were transmitting live radar from Port Control over a 19.2k baud VHS data link to my laptop on the barge. Using the radar data we re-calibrated and cross-checked the GPS positioning to make sure there was no drift, error, or distortion. There was some interesting math going on underneath. Modern radars sample at 50 MHz, giving a 3m inter-sample distance. Getting that 50 MBytes/sec data down a 19.2k bits/sec channel was a challenge. There were some easy gains (inter-pulse dead-time, blanking) but we still needed a radar image the pilots and captains could rely on, especially coming in from open water. There's a picture of it coming in to the river[2] and a video[3] of the vessel, having been fitted, leaving the river. When it came in it didn't have all the super-structure, and the highest point was the heliport, which is where I stood for much of the time. An interesting job. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_production_storage_and_offloading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_production_storage_and... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vessel_traffic_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vessel_traffic_service [2] http://www.ship-technology.com/projects/bonga-fpso/bonga-fpso1.html http://www.ship-technology.com/projects/bonga-fpso/bonga-fps... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKLXiHPNu8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKLXiHPNu8A
- mjb 12y ago
  Cool story! > Modern radars sample at 50 MHz, giving a 3m inter-sample distance. Getting that 50 MBytes/sec data down a 19.2k bits/sec channel was a challenge Surely you would do the processing for target extraction on the radar's side of that link, and send much less frequent samples from the estimated track over the slow link? Tracking on scanning radars can be tricky, but I suspect that would something so big and so slow the processing would be quite simple. It's also a bit surprising that ports don't do this with secondary radar (like airports do). Using the ship's signals with PCL or similar technology would definately be feasible. Radar is a technology with great promise. The advances in computing power, signal processing, and radio technology over the last decade or so is a radar revolution waiting to happen.
sveme 12y ago
There is a second story to it: about a decade ago, the shipyard owners realized that they had already reached the maximum ship size that they could transfer from the shipyard to the sea. So they announced that they would transfer the shipyard to the city of Eemshaven downstream the Ems river - a sensible decision you might think, however, Eemshaven is unfortunately already in the Netherlands. The state government, not wanting to lose a major employer in a rather poor area of the state, built a storm surge barrier to the tune of around 400 mio Euros, arguing it would be for flood prevention. Conveniently, it also allows blocking the outgoing tide, leaving the river at high tide for more than a couple of hours, allowing for larger ships to travel to the sea. At apparently quite an ecological cost. Well, surprisingly the shipyard stayed in Lower Saxony. So much for European integration. But it seems like they reached maximum ship size yet again, wondering what they are coming up with next.
qwerta 12y ago
It does not always go as planned. In 2006 boat caused major blackout in Europe, more then 15M people were without electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout
jug6ernaut 12y ago
I regularly visit Port Aransas Texas, often fishing the shipping channel that goes to Corpus Christi. The channel can not handle the biggest of tankers, the supertankers. But even so, i can not overstate the size of these ships. It never ceases to amazes me. When you are in the channel you have to take into account them coming through the channel, and i dont mean simply getting out of there way, the channel is plenty wide to hold two(as they go both ways) with much space on both sides. I mean the effect they have on the channel, specifically when they are coming in (full of cargo). When full they draft a full 10-15' more of water. Displacing this much water causes mini tsunami in the channel. If you are to close to the bank you could either find yourself beached or slammed against something. Its really a spectacle when they come by, even after seeing it hundreds of times i still stop and watch. One thing not mentioned in this article which is a HUGE factor with moving these large ships is wind drift. Any boat /ship will act as a sail, but the bigger you get the harder it is to control. As anyone who has piloted any vessel can tell you it only takes seconds to get out of control. When moving these huge ships through such tight quarters i can only imagine how difficult it is to control.
- gk1 12y ago
  I once got to experience the other end of that: Being on a ship while it's going through a tiny canal. In my case, it was the Kiel Canal in Germany. (When you're standing on the deck of a ship, you can't see the small gap -- between ship and land -- unless you stretch your neck over the rail and look down.) So imagine this: You've spent many days on the open sea, with nothing but water in every direction. It's become so normal to you that you forget there's other life out there, beyond the steel hull. Then one morning you wake up from a deep sleep and step outside, and... You're surrounded by land! You can't see the canal beneath you, but you can see the beautiful park you're in, with joggers, mothers with strollers, and couples holding hands. It's very bizarre, and I'm not sure I'd get used to it either.
  - tcopeland 12y ago
    Even transiting the Panama Canal in a smallish (210 foot USCG medium endurance cutter) is kind of weird. One day you're underway making way in the Pacific, the next day you've got mules pulling you through locks.
dmoo 12y ago
Not quite the same but big ships in the Corinth Canal in Greece just look fantastic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6xOPAetZuQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6xOPAetZuQ http://hhvferry.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/orientexpress_corinth2.jpg http://hhvferry.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/orientex...
sveme 12y ago
A nice time lapse video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=PHJWbhq4qTE#t=84 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=PHJ...
idlewords 12y ago
Reminds me of the A380, every one of which has to be squeezed through the tiny French town of Levignac on its way to assembly. http://www.cnet.com/pictures/tiny-french-village-meet-giant-airbus-a380-photos/ http://www.cnet.com/pictures/tiny-french-village-meet-giant-...
adnam 12y ago
Unrelated, bit it irks me that in 2014 there are three countries left that have not adapted to the metric system: Liberia, Burma, and the United States. So when I read "1,141 feet long with room for more than 4,000 passengers" I have to mentally translate it to: "348 meters long with room for more than 20-score passengers"
- Fomite 12y ago
  The magazine that published the article is based in one of those countries.
- napoleond 12y ago
  > 20-score passengers I'm with you on the metric, but... 20-score? Really?
  - i_cannot_hack 12y ago
    He's joking.
- hughdbrown 12y ago
  A score is 20 so 20-score would be 400, not 4,000. Is that the joke?
  - adnam 12y ago
    Yeah I meant to write 200-score but using mobile and fat-fingered it.
  - pkaye 12y ago
    I'm guessing the joke that that a "score" is an obscure unit of measure.
    - hughdbrown 12y ago
      Little-used? Sure. Obscure, unknown? "Four score and seven years ago ..."
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
Scroll down to the Medusa Challenger navigating the Chicago river in 72. http://galleries.apps.chicagotribune.com/chi-20131028-st-marys-medusa-challenger-pictures/ http://galleries.apps.chicagotribune.com/chi-20131028-st-mar... Talk about a tight fit. That must have been incredibly stressful.

112 points by sveme 12y ago

The article reminds me of the "fitting a ladder around a corner" problem that I saw in numerical analysis class years ago. Expanded forms of this problem include the food trolley and sofa problems... take a look at http://www.researchgate.net/publication/220154823_Moving_a_Food_Trolley_Around_a_Corner/links/0deec528ccc410c9cf000000 http://www.researchgate.net/publication/220154823_Moving_a_F...

johnohara 12y ago

“Everything is unusual on this trip,” says Bernard Meyer, managing partner of the firm. Meyer is the great-great-great-grandson of Willm Rolf Meyer. He founded the company in 1795, choosing a spot in Papenburg so construction projects would be safe from storms. In his wildest dreams, I doubt Willm Rolf Meyer could have ever imagined this as a legacy. Or that his family business would survive 219 years and apply its experience this way. Remarkable.

junto 12y ago
I assume that this firm counts as one of the German "Mittelstand". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand
- johnohara 12y ago
  Interesting read. Thank you for posting it.

RyanMcGreal 12y ago

> a full moon (or no moon) is ideal to ensure the water was at its deepest. Here's a fun word: syzygy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syzygy_(astronomy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syzygy_(astronomy)

xenophonf 12y ago
That's odd. I typed it in and nothing happened.
- emjaygee 12y ago
  You have to type it three times.

IanDrake 12y ago

>It is a beast of a ship, 1,141 feet long with room for more than 4,000 passengers "I want to be crammed on a ship with 4,000 other people" said no one ever. I wonder how these cruise ships make money between the cost of fuel, food, and expensive mishaps.

ceejayoz 12y ago
With all the decks, it's likely roughly as much square footage per person as a mall or a resort.
- mcguire 12y ago
  Judging from my experience on a cruise several years ago, the only major issues are arriving on/leaving the ship in port (and they somehow managed that process so that it wasn't that big of a deal) and scheduling dinner in the evening (there were two or three seatings and, by god, you had to be there on time).
Fomite 12y ago
Shipping is massively fuel efficient, and enjoys economies of scale Food is built into the cost of the cruise itself. Mishaps are insured, and relatively rare. Insuring ships is a very old industry.
- IanDrake 12y ago
  >Shipping is massively fuel efficient That's interesting. >Mishaps are insured The cost I was thinking of was the bad PR. Ships running aground with people dying, mass strandings at sea with people living in squalor unable to flush toilets, and general sickness run wild.
  - Fomite 12y ago
    Ships and trains are the most fuel efficient ways to transport things - and things include people. In terms of the bad PR, I confess I'm biased - I'm an epidemiologist, with a fondness for GI infections, so norovirus is near and dear to my heart. But cruises have good marketing, the failures like that are relatively rare on a mass scale, and it's a cheap vacation that feels like luxury to people.

ColinWright 12y ago

I once assisted getting a barge into a port. Technically it was a barge, because it didn't have its own engines, but it was an FPSO[0] and it was 310 metres long and 80 metres wide - you could fit three football fields in its footprint. My job was to provide real-time live radar from the land-based VTS[1]. It had been decided that only relying on GPS was a risk, and that independent radar images would be necessary to confirm position, course, and speed. We were transmitting live radar from Port Control over a 19.2k baud VHS data link to my laptop on the barge. Using the radar data we re-calibrated and cross-checked the GPS positioning to make sure there was no drift, error, or distortion. There was some interesting math going on underneath. Modern radars sample at 50 MHz, giving a 3m inter-sample distance. Getting that 50 MBytes/sec data down a 19.2k bits/sec channel was a challenge. There were some easy gains (inter-pulse dead-time, blanking) but we still needed a radar image the pilots and captains could rely on, especially coming in from open water. There's a picture of it coming in to the river[2] and a video[3] of the vessel, having been fitted, leaving the river. When it came in it didn't have all the super-structure, and the highest point was the heliport, which is where I stood for much of the time. An interesting job. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_production_storage_and_offloading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_production_storage_and... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vessel_traffic_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vessel_traffic_service [2] http://www.ship-technology.com/projects/bonga-fpso/bonga-fpso1.html http://www.ship-technology.com/projects/bonga-fpso/bonga-fps... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKLXiHPNu8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKLXiHPNu8A

mjb 12y ago
Cool story! > Modern radars sample at 50 MHz, giving a 3m inter-sample distance. Getting that 50 MBytes/sec data down a 19.2k bits/sec channel was a challenge Surely you would do the processing for target extraction on the radar's side of that link, and send much less frequent samples from the estimated track over the slow link? Tracking on scanning radars can be tricky, but I suspect that would something so big and so slow the processing would be quite simple. It's also a bit surprising that ports don't do this with secondary radar (like airports do). Using the ship's signals with PCL or similar technology would definately be feasible. Radar is a technology with great promise. The advances in computing power, signal processing, and radio technology over the last decade or so is a radar revolution waiting to happen.

sveme 12y ago

There is a second story to it: about a decade ago, the shipyard owners realized that they had already reached the maximum ship size that they could transfer from the shipyard to the sea. So they announced that they would transfer the shipyard to the city of Eemshaven downstream the Ems river - a sensible decision you might think, however, Eemshaven is unfortunately already in the Netherlands. The state government, not wanting to lose a major employer in a rather poor area of the state, built a storm surge barrier to the tune of around 400 mio Euros, arguing it would be for flood prevention. Conveniently, it also allows blocking the outgoing tide, leaving the river at high tide for more than a couple of hours, allowing for larger ships to travel to the sea. At apparently quite an ecological cost. Well, surprisingly the shipyard stayed in Lower Saxony. So much for European integration. But it seems like they reached maximum ship size yet again, wondering what they are coming up with next.

qwerta 12y ago

It does not always go as planned. In 2006 boat caused major blackout in Europe, more then 15M people were without electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout

jug6ernaut 12y ago

I regularly visit Port Aransas Texas, often fishing the shipping channel that goes to Corpus Christi. The channel can not handle the biggest of tankers, the supertankers. But even so, i can not overstate the size of these ships. It never ceases to amazes me. When you are in the channel you have to take into account them coming through the channel, and i dont mean simply getting out of there way, the channel is plenty wide to hold two(as they go both ways) with much space on both sides. I mean the effect they have on the channel, specifically when they are coming in (full of cargo). When full they draft a full 10-15' more of water. Displacing this much water causes mini tsunami in the channel. If you are to close to the bank you could either find yourself beached or slammed against something. Its really a spectacle when they come by, even after seeing it hundreds of times i still stop and watch. One thing not mentioned in this article which is a HUGE factor with moving these large ships is wind drift. Any boat /ship will act as a sail, but the bigger you get the harder it is to control. As anyone who has piloted any vessel can tell you it only takes seconds to get out of control. When moving these huge ships through such tight quarters i can only imagine how difficult it is to control.

gk1 12y ago
I once got to experience the other end of that: Being on a ship while it's going through a tiny canal. In my case, it was the Kiel Canal in Germany. (When you're standing on the deck of a ship, you can't see the small gap -- between ship and land -- unless you stretch your neck over the rail and look down.) So imagine this: You've spent many days on the open sea, with nothing but water in every direction. It's become so normal to you that you forget there's other life out there, beyond the steel hull. Then one morning you wake up from a deep sleep and step outside, and... You're surrounded by land! You can't see the canal beneath you, but you can see the beautiful park you're in, with joggers, mothers with strollers, and couples holding hands. It's very bizarre, and I'm not sure I'd get used to it either.
- tcopeland 12y ago
  Even transiting the Panama Canal in a smallish (210 foot USCG medium endurance cutter) is kind of weird. One day you're underway making way in the Pacific, the next day you've got mules pulling you through locks.

dmoo 12y ago

Not quite the same but big ships in the Corinth Canal in Greece just look fantastic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6xOPAetZuQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6xOPAetZuQ http://hhvferry.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/orientexpress_corinth2.jpg http://hhvferry.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/orientex...

sveme 12y ago

A nice time lapse video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=PHJWbhq4qTE#t=84 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=PHJ...

idlewords 12y ago

Reminds me of the A380, every one of which has to be squeezed through the tiny French town of Levignac on its way to assembly. http://www.cnet.com/pictures/tiny-french-village-meet-giant-airbus-a380-photos/ http://www.cnet.com/pictures/tiny-french-village-meet-giant-...

adnam 12y ago

Unrelated, bit it irks me that in 2014 there are three countries left that have not adapted to the metric system: Liberia, Burma, and the United States. So when I read "1,141 feet long with room for more than 4,000 passengers" I have to mentally translate it to: "348 meters long with room for more than 20-score passengers"

Fomite 12y ago
The magazine that published the article is based in one of those countries.
napoleond 12y ago
> 20-score passengers I'm with you on the metric, but... 20-score? Really?
- i_cannot_hack 12y ago
  He's joking.
hughdbrown 12y ago
A score is 20 so 20-score would be 400, not 4,000. Is that the joke?
- adnam 12y ago
  Yeah I meant to write 200-score but using mobile and fat-fingered it.
- pkaye 12y ago
  I'm guessing the joke that that a "score" is an obscure unit of measure.
  - hughdbrown 12y ago
    Little-used? Sure. Obscure, unknown? "Four score and seven years ago ..."

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

Scroll down to the Medusa Challenger navigating the Chicago river in 72. http://galleries.apps.chicagotribune.com/chi-20131028-st-marys-medusa-challenger-pictures/ http://galleries.apps.chicagotribune.com/chi-20131028-st-mar... Talk about a tight fit. That must have been incredibly stressful.