Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 593 posts

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

#301

Post by iso1210 »

lisper wrote: post #187
chipsambos wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree it's incalculable, I don't mean that in the "it's too big of a number" sort of way but in the "we can't possibly know" kind of way: 1) The scale and depth of the disruption makes it impractical to figure in any kind of accurate way and 2) The disruption will have introduced hypotheticals that nay spiral out themselves (butterfly effect style) e.g. some retailer may have lost a customer who went elsewhere, some…

You can get a rough idea by thinking of this as if it were a natural disaster, and from that perspective I think the toll is probably not too bad. No casualties, very little property damage, and a week is not really all that long. However... that is no excuse to shrug this off. We were very, very lucky that it was only a week. The ship could easily have broken in two, which would have been a catastrophe of the first…

The canal revenues were down about $15m/day. If it really cost $7b a day, then Egypt is massively undercharging.

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

#302

Post by scrollaway »

Karunamon wrote: post #126
scrollaway wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is, "it's complicated"?

Quite, but I'm also saying that your analogy was terminally flawed. Supply chain shipping != shipping your widget from Amazon.

Wasn't supposed to be an analogy but rather a simplification of the fact that delayed goods do not translate 1:1 to losses.

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

#303

Post by VBprogrammer »

gambiting wrote: post #293
shagie wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the Ever Given may not have an issue, the HAJH AMINA which is waiting in the Great Bitter Lake is a livestock carrier that should have been unloading in port yesterday.

Sure but the same principles apply - delays happen, and livestock ships are equipped to keep livestock alive with food and water well stocked in case they can't enter port for days(which again, happens all the time, sometimes papers aren't exactly right and the livestock has to wait on the ship until cleared for offloading)

I've seen this ship mentioned a couple of times. I kind of assume the subtext is that we should stop sending live animals by ship (except for perhaps specialist and breading stock), which I totally agree with, as much for the dangers of spreading disease as for an ethical concern for the animals involved.

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

#304

Post by Reason077 »

foobarbaz33 wrote: post #299
Reason077 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s probably less than that because many transits would have just been delayed, not entirely cancelled.

They run the canal at maximum capacity indefinitely. Due to the lack of downtime, any delays are in effect the same thing as a cancel from the perspective of the canal owners.

According to reports, the backlog of traffic should be cleared in about 10 days. They must have some spare capacity available in order to do that.

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

#305

Post by NicoJuicy »

For those who are wondering.

The canal is shallow at the sides, for a ship as this, this creates a suction when it's not in the middle.

The captain wasn't going straight ( zigzag) and while he wanted to get out of the suction on the left side, the ship turned way too much to the right.

There's a really good animation here at 1:03 in the video ( dutch): https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2021/03/29/zeevaartschool-maakt...

Video is talking about a "sea driving school" that simulated the incident in their simulator.

My info above is the Dutch information required to see the video from 1:03 till after the animation.

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

#306

Post by temp0826 »

arethuza wrote: post #259
leoh wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There appears to be little "high-end engineering." Just a high tide and a bunch of tug boats.

Pretty sure I've seen a definition of engineering that was "Solve the problem by doing as little new as possible".

Sometimes the safest way to deal with the so-called legacy systems we all know and love

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

#307

Post by hinkley »

hderms wrote: post #166
leoh wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There appears to be little "high-end engineering." Just a high tide and a bunch of tug boats.

A high tide and some tug boats becomes 'high-end engineering' if it works

Have you looked at tug boat propulsion units lately? Those things look like black magic.

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

#308

Post by hinkley »

zelos wrote: post #201
hderms wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A high tide and some tug boats becomes 'high-end engineering' if it works

I'd guess figuring out where you can safely attach the tug boats, monitoring stability and stresses on the container ship and so on is non-trivial, too.

If you fuck up bad enough those containers end up landing on the tugs, killing the crews. Not to mention increasing the quantity of stuff blocking the canal.

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

#310

Post by Taek »

iso1210 wrote: post #301
lisper wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get a rough idea by thinking of this as if it were a natural disaster, and from that perspective I think the toll is probably not too bad. No casualties, very little property damage, and a week is not really all that long. However... that is no excuse to shrug this off. We were very, very lucky that it was only a week. The ship could easily have broken in two, which would have been a catastrophe of the first…

The canal revenues were down about $15m/day. If it really cost $7b a day, then Egypt is massively undercharging.

Not necessarily. I pay only $1 a day for water, but if you stop giving me water for 7 days the damages are going to be a lot more than $7. That doesn't mean it's reasonable to charge me more than $1 per day for water.

Obviously an extreme example, but the situation with this ship is likely similar. The damages probably far exceed the $15m/day in revenue (though I suspect they are far lower than $7b per day).

Post reply on HN