Love the armchair engineers who think they're gonna solve this better than billion dollar companies
Detonate a small but still relatively powerful bomb upstream (or maybe multiple small but staggered ones), to create a small tsunami-like wave, which in turn will move at least the ship's aft/stern (as the ship creates in the canal a "V"-like shape which will therefore concentrate most of the wave's force in that area) when it hits it. Almost guaranteed to work, theoretically.
IIRC the banks of the canal aren't very high above the water level.
Is it naive to suggest that they start digging a detour around this roadblock? I feel like it would take less time to do that than to try to move the ship out of the way. The Army Corps of Engineers can build waterways and levies like it's nobody's business.
Dig it with what? By the time you could get anything in place and start digging any sort of a detour, you'll get this ship removed. This is not a small detour. These ships can't turn well so any detour would need to be very long and would take months to dig out (even if you had infrastructure in place to do it). You could nuke it though. Throw a bunch of nukes in a line and you are good to go. :D
> You could nuke it though. Throw a bunch of nukes in a line and you are good to go. :D
People are talking about excavators but why isn't anyone talking about bulldozers? Sure the sand won't be amazing to pull against but it's a lot less movable than water.
It's a Canal not the middle of the ocean. Should be able to get 20+ bulldozers on each side to try and straighten things out. They've got the gears and they've got the tracks. It might not work but it's got a lot better chances than tugs.
Quite the arrogance here of mostly software devs trying to out -solutionize marine/shipping experts who undoubtedly have been consulted and are already looking for the quickest way to resolve the situation. With billions of dollars in stake, I'm sure even the most expensive experts are involved.
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…
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?
Egypt is bleeding money right now. It earned roughly USD 15,360,000.00/day from Suez passage fees in 2020.
Just another non-expert, but I wonder if the simplest approach might be to pump water under it to wash away the sand it's beached on. Googling, it seems that this is a recognised technique for dredging: https://www.iadc-dredging.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/fac... Whether it works might be dependent on what kind of soil its sitting on and whether the current is strong enough to take away the dislodged particles. I…
Can someone explain why dredging alone isn't sufficient? Is it too slow?
> Might need a small nuclear power plant or two to make it feasible. Amazingly, that's a severe underestimation. The force on a wire carrying current in a magnetic field is given by F = B*I*l, and to move it upwards that force needs to be at least equal to gravity, so equate to F = m*g. - Let's be generous and assume B = 100 uT = 100 * 10^-6 T. - Likewise, assume the ship is a rectangular box with sides of 400 m x 10…
Add another 40,000 tonnes for the empty containers, then probably that again for whatever is in them. Plus probably another 10,000 tonnes for fuel. Really it may be conservative to say another 100,000 tonnes for all the stuff other than the 200,000 tonnes of the ship itself.
The 200,000 metric tonne figure was derived from the deadweight tonnage, which is the weight of fuel and cargo a ship can carry, but excludes the weight of the empty ship itself. Wikipedia doesn't list displacement (which is weight of the ship plus cargo) for the Ever Given, but empty weight of modern container ships is on the order of 10% of their capacity, so ignoring the ships empty weight isn't the worst approximation used.