401–410 of 593 posts
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The 1974 operation involved ten ships, the largest of which was 6700 tons. The Ever Given displaces 220,000 tons. It's an entirely different beast.
While our ships have grown greatly, so has our ability to salvage them at the same time.
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?
those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me Is it just me, but hasn't the mainstream financial news over the years taken on the feel of reality television? The talking heads are usually pushing some sort of narrative . Occasionally, reality overwhelms their ability to spin things, and they have to readjust and do damage control, as sometimes happens t…
I like to look at the bright side: The world has caught up with Egyptian geography. :)
A great Twitter thread with many articles/resources if you want a critical lens at the global logistics supply chain. https://twitter.com/CharmaineSChua/status/137586855212986368... I found this article on the impact on super-sized ships on logistical infrastructure useful and fascinating. It describes how the creation of ships too big to fit in the Panama canal (post-PANAMAX ships) was received by 1) Panamanians 2)…
>the hydrodynamic effects of these large ships in relatively shallow and narrow canals is underappreciated I'm really surprised I haven't seen this mentioned. A long time ago, I was trained as a merchant ship's navigation officer. One of the things we were taught (but unfortunately had few opportunities to practice), was using "bank cushion" or "bank suction" to use the hydraulic interaction between the hull and a na…
Juan Brown/Blancolirio channel has a good overview and he touches on hydronic interactions you reference too: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5iyn2q6s1Sk
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Probably the actual cost will require an army of accountants and lawyers at a dozen major logistics corporations arguing with each other for months to even try to compute. I doubt us regular uninvolved people will ever get a "real" number. How do you even try to calculate and reveal the cost associated with say a manufacturer in the middle of a supply chain deciding to source their parts from a different vendor for t…
This makes me question that shouldn't we have another canal built? Like if so much of the world's economy depends on this route shouldn't we build an extra canal to speed up the transportation and also act as a redundancy
A Bloomberg article (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-27/how-a-des...) says the speed limit was 7.6 to 8.6 knots but the Ever Given was traveling at 13.5 knots. So maybe they need to start enforcing that limit.
Reportedly this was during high winds, so they could also reduce the speed limit even further in those conditions.
Or they could have Suez specialists be the ones piloting large ships through the canal rather than the ship's normal crew. (As I understand it, that's pretty standard for harbors. Not sure if the Suez already does that.)
Or maybe there's a technology solution, something like stability control for cars, except it's for ships in narrow canals.
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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.
It's a huge mistake to regard any international trade in the middle east as regulated by simple supply and demand curves. This is a site of world geostrategic focus, usually at the expense of the people that live there.
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…
Those comments were really helpful to me. HM did a great job at showing just how insanely large this ship is and why it will be difficult to get it unstuck. To a layman such as myself, a boat remaining stuck for almost an entire week sounds pretty absurd without that context.
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>Of course each meter of depth is a little harder, but not that much harder. lol - cut and fill on a slope is not trivial. It’s more of an exponential function than a linear one for the amount of material removed the deeper you have to go down. They dodged a HUGE bullet with the highest tides happening this weekend. If they had gone beyond a Tuesday with the drop in tides each day as the moon got further away it woul…
The seasonal variation in the tides is like 20 centimeters. The draft of the ship is more than 10 meters at the bow.
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This makes me question that shouldn't we have another canal built? Like if so much of the world's economy depends on this route shouldn't we build an extra canal to speed up the transportation and also act as a redundancy
It's a lot further to dig, but the next best thing would be to dig from the Persian gulf through Iraq, Syria and probably Lebanon. Not forgetting half the Persian Gulf is Iran. It's not exactly the most stable geopolitical area.
As an alternative (and ignoring the obviously substantial geopolitical concerns), is there a geographic reason not to dig a canal on the other side of the Sinai from, say, Aqaba to Rafah? If you had to dig that far, it would seem to be the next best option.
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They built a computer model to try and manage the stress on the ship as they worked to free it. It was not straightforward as the ship could have broken if they weren't extremely careful. They also had divers inspecting the hull for signs of stress. This was a massive, complex operation.
Boskalis Peter Berdowski said it wans't a very hard job technically on Dutch television. Just the scale and impact were huge.
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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…
That's no joke. Salvage operations is such a fascinating topic, which I'm sure many (me included) found themselves quickly obsessed with. The sagging and hogging threshold of this ship is the critical key here. I'm curious how close/or not the hull came to being compromised.