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Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

reuters.com

61–70 of 593 posts

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#61
post #33

It's worth looking at the discussion of the ship just three days ago on Hacker News[1]. A lot of what people thought was true (that it would be stuck there for weeks, being dismissive of using tugboats to pull it out) didn't pan out as expected. Just a reminder that we should always take what we read with a grain of salt, and that it's fine to reserve judgement and see what will actually happen after the initial medi…

The HN crowd tends to be heavily bearish on pretty much everything here, and there's an ironic lack of respect for experts in fields beyond those few HN favorite topics (e.g., low-level programming languages).

So, the difference in the expected outcome here doesn't surprise me.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#62
Lots of articles quote a $XXX billion dollars per day figure, but those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me.

Are there any estimates as to the actual cost of this "mishap", due to e.g. spoilage, financial/contractual repercussions of late deliveries, personnel/fuel costs?

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#63
post #33

It's worth looking at the discussion of the ship just three days ago on Hacker News[1]. A lot of what people thought was true (that it would be stuck there for weeks, being dismissive of using tugboats to pull it out) didn't pan out as expected. Just a reminder that we should always take what we read with a grain of salt, and that it's fine to reserve judgement and see what will actually happen after the initial medi…

Yeah, but sitting around and reserving judgement wouldn't make for a very interesting comment section. :)

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#64
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the biggest luck event in this case, is that there was a dredger pretty close to the ship. If you dont have a dredger and you need to ship one there we would have wait much more time

Knowing nothing about it, would it be safe to assume that the Suez Canal would always have a dredger around? Or is that not how that works?

I assume it's the same kind of luck that places gas stations near motorways.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#65
post #33

It's worth looking at the discussion of the ship just three days ago on Hacker News[1]. A lot of what people thought was true (that it would be stuck there for weeks, being dismissive of using tugboats to pull it out) didn't pan out as expected. Just a reminder that we should always take what we read with a grain of salt, and that it's fine to reserve judgement and see what will actually happen after the initial medi…

Also, if we’re being honest, a pack of software nerds on a website don’t have the deep expertise on every topic like they think they do (speaking as a software nerd on a website myself :)). The stuff that gets posted here sometimes is...fascinating.

To be fair, there were a number of people chiming in who were claiming to be experienced in that area (ex Navy captains, people who did dredging ops, etc). One of the big things that changed the timeline was that the highest tide of the month occurred yesterday; if not, I imagine that ship would be stuck for another month!

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#66

I wonder why the previous link to track it is not working again. Would have been cool to see it navigating the canal: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000

> imo=9811000 I find it neat? strange? that IMO numbers have checksums: > An IMO number is made of the three letters "IMO" followed by a seven-digit number. This consists of a six-digit sequential unique number followed by a check digit. The integrity of an IMO number can be verified using its check digit. This is done by multiplying each of the first six digits by a factor of 2 to 7 corresponding to their position f…

> I find it neat? strange? that IMO numbers have checksums:

It’s a relatively common feature of ID numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#67
post #43

I wonder how much the couple of excavators helped. I saw people on HN saying having two measly excavators was just to give the appearance of doing something and not an actual attempt to get the boat unstuck. But when I saw a photo of the digging, it looked like there was some serious progress made.

I read it was six, running 24 hours a day, which moved 27,000 metric tons of sand.

Which, sounds like a lot of sand to me. Seems like software engineers would have the best understanding of slowly but steadily working towards a goal since that's been my life since I started in this field!

But, also, I admittedly bit the hype train too on how hard it was going to be to get this thing dislodged.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#69
post #51
post #43

I wonder how much the couple of excavators helped. I saw people on HN saying having two measly excavators was just to give the appearance of doing something and not an actual attempt to get the boat unstuck. But when I saw a photo of the digging, it looked like there was some serious progress made.

I wonder how they think the canal was created.

I’m actually really curious about this! It was built in the mid 19th century, was there excavators then? Or was it shovels and manpower? I looked on wikipedia hoping to find some info, but was sadly disappointed. I would TOTALLY read an in depth article on how, practically, the Suez canal was actually built.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#70
post #33

It's worth looking at the discussion of the ship just three days ago on Hacker News[1]. A lot of what people thought was true (that it would be stuck there for weeks, being dismissive of using tugboats to pull it out) didn't pan out as expected. Just a reminder that we should always take what we read with a grain of salt, and that it's fine to reserve judgement and see what will actually happen after the initial medi…

We got lucky. But several weeks was real scenario. If this boat would leak, ruptured, broke in half...
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