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…
Couldn't we just place dynamite near the front and use the explosion to push the ship off the sand/rocks and back into the water?
Fun facts: 1. The owner is Japanese 2. The operator is Taiwanese 3. The flag is Panamanian 4. The cargo is Chinese 5. The insurer is British 6. The crew is Indian 7. The canal is Egyptian and was built with forced labor by the French 8. The dredgers/salvage op managers are Dutch
Go, go gadget globalisation!
Seriously though that's pretty amazing.
Fun fact: corporations used to exist for a limit period of time, to solve a particular problem, and were then dissolved. With the introduction of indefinite corporations, we end up with cool setups like those /u/throwawaybutwhy has highlighted.
In the middle parts of the ship it is probably not grounded, so you might have ropes below the hull with large inflatable balloons on both sides below water level, to give the ship extra lift. Then on a high tide, with oil & water removed, maybe some dredging on the sides where it needs to rotate to, and.. go!
Maybe something like those air/water tanks they attached to the side of the Costa Concordia to float it [1]. But you would have to take great care to prevent it from rolling over, so you probably can't lift it up too far. 1: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28288823
Using the same Concordia techniques maybe SMIT Salvage would float Evergreen to 'loosen' it a bit out of sand, loosen further by dredging, and then when high tide comes [1], Evergreen would be able to turn around with help of tug boats.
This is the way. Just check the contents first so there's nothing really harmful inside. Also start scaling up to multiple trebuchets as soon as possible and make it rain. Stimulate the local economy via job creation for the clean up. Monetize the live stream too. The trebuchet will save the global supply chain thanks to you.
> Monetize the live stream too. Don't forget to sell the containers as NFTs.
I’ve always wondered what something like this costs and who is responsible for paying the bill?
I have the same question. I would think EverGreen as they are the root cause of problem. And it seems they cause regularly. (similar thing happened a few years ago by the very same ship)
Do you have a citation I can see? This isn't me challenging your assertion, I'm just interested to see what happened :)
Can they drive pilings on the edge of the canal, and attach cables from the pilings to the boat at various points? Seems like driving pilings is an operation which can be done in parallel, while unloading the containers is mostly serialized. I’m also assuming that wenches connected to pilings are able to pull harder than tug boats.
Exactly. I'm guessing weeks rather than days, and maybe more than that. The best I can come up with is heavy lift helicopters to at least remove the front most containers to relieve some of the pressure but even that would be an enormous operation. Anything else would require major construction especially if it is to reach more than just the first four or five rows which is likely not going to be enough. https://en.w…
The helicopter itself is 30 tons, leaving you 30. But 60 is the max takeoff weight. The max weight it is actually designed to operate at when carrying the maximum load is about 55 tons. With 30 for the helicopter itself, that leaves 25 tons for the load. A container can be up to 33 tons loaded, so the heaviest will be beyond that helicopter (at least of you don't want to push it past its safe limits). I assume that t…
I said 'total weight'. That includes the helicopter, obviously, you're not going to magically get a zero mass helicopter.
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…
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 l…
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.
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…
Helicopters are a thing. And yeah, even completely empty with no fuel or ballast you will never see the bow out of the water like that. However it is more than capable of surviving being dragged along sand. It's just that they have nothing strong enough to drag it with. Eventually someone will stake some anchors into the ground and use an industrial winch, but that's where hull design starts to suck - there's no good…
This was my though, winchers/dozers etc pulling back the angle it went in on a high tide. Of all the solutions suggested this seems the simplest and easiest materials.
For anchor points they could easily weld additional steel plates/rings at numerous points on the hull for a many lines spread out.
Maybe place some cables under the front section attached to airbags. It would not lift it off the sand but may help with downward pressure on the pull back + the excavator work.
Also cant you vibrate/aerate sand to make it have a liquid effect? Might help pressure but no idea how that could be done at scale required... winches and cable seems easy to access fast.
Exactly. I'm guessing weeks rather than days, and maybe more than that. The best I can come up with is heavy lift helicopters to at least remove the front most containers to relieve some of the pressure but even that would be an enormous operation. Anything else would require major construction especially if it is to reach more than just the first four or five rows which is likely not going to be enough. https://en.w…
You can't take only the containers at the ends, however, because the uneven weight would cause the center of the ship to collapse.
Not so sure about that collapse, the keel of the ship is currently supporting all of that weight and seems to be holding up just fine. It's essentially a suspension bridge at this point, but I agree that it is probably better to unload evenly, however, that will add another very substantial time penalty. If the ship would break (which I have no idea at what load imbalance that would happen) there would be a delay a lot longer so it may be worth it to play this extra safe. But there is a very large amount of pressure on the people there to get this resolved.