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Is that ship still stuck?

istheshipstillstuck.com

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Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#911

Post by DonCopal »

tomerv wrote: post #896
maury91 wrote: post #867

You are all missing the simple solution: construct another canal next to it, so the other ships can continue to pass. ( I'm joking, do not take this as a serious solution )

I actually don't understand why this isn't the best option right now. The east bank is mostly empty, and the channel is pretty shallow. You could probably construct a 1km detour within a few weeks with relatively low cost. Seems like a good way to hedge the bet of getting it unstuck.

> within a few weeks

Haha, no. Just no.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#912

Post by PeterisP »

leesec wrote: post #105
BrianOnHN wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot of containers.

You don't need to remove all of them? Just get it light enough to float it?

Removing 10% of containers by helicopter also would take unreasonable time, removing 1% of containers might be plausible but I don't think it would make enough of a difference to justify the risks.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#913

Post by ant6n »

yoaviram wrote: post #742
barbegal wrote: post #291

It will be weeks before this ship is free. Fuel and oil can be pumped out but that only makes up a fraction of the total weight of the vessel. Containers can be unloaded but again the lightest will be at the top so a significant number will need to be removed to make a big enough difference. And unloading them will be a slow process. You can maybe unload a few per hour with helicopters. There doesn't exist any infras…

How about sectioning off a part of the canal around the ship and pumping water in?

That sounds so crazy, it might just work. One would need to build a wall, possibly out of sand, around the ship, including blocking off the suez Canal itself at two spots.

It’sa bit like that Ceasar built two rings of walls when he was besieging the Gauls but was in turn besieged by the Gaul relief army, greatly and suspencefully explained in this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SU1Ej9Yqt68

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#914

Post by bipson »

samizdis wrote: post #260
blhack wrote: post #39

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…

> Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship. It seems, though, that a partial unloading is being considered by a professional in the field according to quotes in an article in The Guardian [1]: However, Peter Berdowski, CEO of Boskalis, a specialist dredging company that has sent a crew to the scene, said data so far suggested “it is not real…

Not just a professional in the field, he works for the company that got the assignment.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#915

Post by azalemeth »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #699
antidamage wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just an order of magnitude viz-a-viz a winch:

-- the Ever Given has a mass of ~220,000 tons (2.2e8 kg)

-- let us very conservatively assume that it is a homogeneous block, 1/3rd of which is on sand, 2/3rds of which is on water

-- the Coulomb coefficient of friction for steel on sand is a very complex function of sand composition and size, but roughly it's about µ=0.5 and F=µR [1]

-- For the 2/3rds of the ship that are in the water assume that it moves frictionlessly in an inviscid liquid (not true at all else ships wouldn't have huge engines!)

-- You therefore need to apply a net tension of ≥0.3 x 0.5 x 2.2e8 ≈ 33 MN to a wire to have a remote chance in hell of accelerating the ship backwards

-- This is about twice the thrust of a Space Shuttle solid rocket booster at liftoff.

[1] https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sandf1972/26/4/26_4_139...

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#916

Post by bondarchuk »

Would a good old ship camel work? Position some huge water-filled tanks underneath the ship, pump the water out and replace with air, to lift the ship up. Then hopefully it becomes unstuck enough to tow it clear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_camel

In comparison with other proposed solutions I've seen, it would probably not rip the ship apart if distributed evenly over the hull. Yes, the ship is huge, but plain plastic containers and pumps scale quite nicely. Although in good armchair engineering tradition, I have not run the numbers.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#917

Post by markus_zhang »

throwawaybutwhy wrote: post #689

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

Pretty much summed up the current world order...

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#919

Post by PeterisP »

trhway wrote: post #416
blhack wrote: post #39

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…

>You're basically asking to build a port in the middle of the egyptian desert. No. Helicopters. 10 helis, 1 container/sortie, 10 sorties/hour = 10000 containers in 5 days.

You can't possibly have 10 helis safely unloading cargo at once from a single ship, that'd be an invitation for disaster. Also, doing that in the dark would simply not work. 10 sorties/hour is also unrealistic; with proper cranes and infrastructure at port it would take something like 10 minutes, with choppers it would take more time.

IMHO if helis would even work (which is debatable and debated here), the optimistic estimate is that you could unload something like 20 containers per hour, 300 containers per day, so 30 days for the cargo. It seems plausible that you can dredge the banks and drag the ship out much quicker than that.

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