281–290 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Better Cold War option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare The ship’s a total loss, but Egypt also gets a new lake!
You know there's probably someone doing the cost-benefit analysis right now to see if just digging a new canal channel around the ship would be faster and cheaper than removing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently, there are no watertight gates anywhere near. Filling in the entire canal is unrealistic.
I'm not saying the entire canal. Surround the boat, make a dam somehow. Concrete is dry in 24-48 hours. Sand and wooden poles could be enough. Some ideas on the how, could be found in this video, on how they created a bridge in the middle ages: https://youtu.be/nJgD6gyi0Wk I'm pretty sure engineers could find better/faster solutions than what I'm proposing.
This means you need to provide .. lets see, a trapezoidal cross section is 500 square metres.. 100,000 cubic metres of filler. Twice. And then you probably need to curve it to resist the pressure, so that's a bit of a lowball figure. You can't dam any less, because the ship is stuck sideways across the canal.
Using some old numbers for concrete pours in Ireland (2016 era) per cubic metre, that's 7.5 million Euro worth of concrete. Sure, you're not going to use pure concrete like that though - you'd probably start dropping massive boulders in first, and then try to cap/fill it.
Have a read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Islands to get a feel for how long it takes to lay in that much material..
And then you have to dig it all back up to reopen the canal.
Comedy option, what wacky cold war era aircraft do we have capable of lifting massive loads like a container ship? Perhaps an enormous fleet of Chinook helicopters could take it straight up?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weeks are measured in what I'd call, a lot of money. Is it a consolidation of funds sort of issue? Anybody responsible for getting it fixed?
They hired a company specialized in this kind of stuff (Boskalis), but as their CEO mentioned of TV it depends on how stuck it is. If you're lucky, pumping out the fuel and ballast can make the ship light enough to drag it clear with tugboats. If that doesn't work, you might have to unload some, most or all of the 20k containers from the ship to make it light enough. It can be done, but depending on how much is requi…
~15% of the World's trade is dependent on it and this is taking much longer than expected. Why?
My question, for those who know more about this domain than me, is this a problem that enough money could fix? If the governments of the world wrote a $1 trillion blank check, would that be enough to get the ship out in the next 24 hours? Or is this a problem that money alone can't solve?
Question is, what would happen? Would the ship move the sand it's embedded in, realign with the deepest part of the channel and move off?
Or would the (potentially already damaged) hull breach?
I don't think people are giving enough credit to how stuck the ship is. Look at some of the photos of the front of it. Look at how far out of the water it is sitting. The ship might look like that if it were totally empty, but not when it is full of containers like this. Some people saying: just drag it off of the sand. Okay! And what happens when that causes you to rip a hole into the hull of the ship? Now it's real…
Could you build a temporary barrier around the ship and the section of the canal, bring in some massive pumps, and temporarily raise the water level around the ship? Edit: Something like this https://www.hydrologicalsolutions.com/aqua-barrier-cofferdam...
I don't think people are giving enough credit to how stuck the ship is. Look at some of the photos of the front of it. Look at how far out of the water it is sitting. The ship might look like that if it were totally empty, but not when it is full of containers like this. Some people saying: just drag it off of the sand. Okay! And what happens when that causes you to rip a hole into the hull of the ship? Now it's real…
Love the armchair engineers who think they're gonna solve this better than billion dollar companies
That said, the ones mentioned there don't pass the smell test.
I don't think people are giving enough credit to how stuck the ship is. Look at some of the photos of the front of it. Look at how far out of the water it is sitting. The ship might look like that if it were totally empty, but not when it is full of containers like this. Some people saying: just drag it off of the sand. Okay! And what happens when that causes you to rip a hole into the hull of the ship? Now it's real…
Could you build a temporary barrier around the ship and the section of the canal, bring in some massive pumps, and temporarily raise the water level around the ship? Edit: Something like this https://www.hydrologicalsolutions.com/aqua-barrier-cofferdam...
I am excited to see how they will solve the problem though!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dumb question but what about heavy lift helicopters moving containers off 1 by 1?
There are 20,000 containers on the ship. Assuming you needed to remove 1/4 of those containers to get it to rise far enough to get off of the sand, you need to move 5000 containers. Assume that it takes 5 minute to connect a bridle to a container, hook it to a helicopter, and move it...and then also assume that the helicopters can run 24/7 and never have to refuel, that they can hot swap in pilots, and that there is…
Amount of actual containers is probably the 20.000 divided by 1.6 or so, though it's not a given that any vessel is fully loaded to max capacity. Sometimes need to deal with restrictions.