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Is that ship still stuck?

istheshipstillstuck.com

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Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#131

Post by NicoJuicy »

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…

How about creating a mini-dam surrounding the vessel and raising the water level so it can turn.

Or stopping the current at 90% of the ship and letting it push to the front ( if it's in the right direction), perhaps in combination with gigantic sails ( if there's enough wind) and/or sucking sand/mud from the bottom.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#132

Post by qbasic_forever »

leesec wrote: post #111
qbasic_forever wrote: post #68

Comedy option, what wacky cold war era aircraft do we have capable of lifting massive loads like a container ship? Perhaps an enormous fleet of Chinook helicopters could take it straight up?

Not even close. This ship is absolutely giant.

Hrm change of plans, let's pull a few ICBMs out and set them up on each corner with massive tow lines. We'll get it out the way in an instant... and into low earth orbit minutes later!

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#133

Post by Baeocystin »

dageshi wrote: post #60
dcolkitt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the very least, why aren't they using helicopters to take the containers off one-by-one. That would reduce the overall weight, and it'd be easier to move an empty ship than one weighed down by cargo.

Are there helicopters capable of lifting a fully loaded cargo container?

No. The absolute heaviest-lift helicopter, the MI-26, can lift a little over 20 short tons. Most helicopters can carry a ton or two at most.

In comparison, unloaded shipping containers are already a few tons. Loaded ones are all over the place, of course, but max out at around 30.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#134

Post by sliken »

electrotype wrote: post #112

Genuine question: why not simply pull its back in the reverse direction it was going, until its front is unstuck?

Because the momentum of a huge ship dug quite deeply into the sides of the canal quite hard, so it's no longer floating.

It's nowhere close to floating currently, and a ship can't be pulled with arbitrarily large forces without damage.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#135

Post by ArkanExplorer »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #14

Had rockets not been so regulated, this problem could have easily been solved. It would not be cheap but with a 150million insurance budget it is doable. Egypt is losing 400million in trade every hour. The ship weighs 200 000 tons. You only need to drag it out of the sand, not bring it to LEO. Another option would be a lot of shaped charges but the side effects are much more catastrophic if things go wrong. In the ol…

Egypt is losing transit fees.

A typical bulk carrier pays about $200,000 per transit.

51 ships transit the canal each day, on average.

Egypt is losing $10m per day.

Edit: the canal generated $5.85billion in revenue in 2018, or $16million per day.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-egypt-economy-suezcanal-i...

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#136

Post by kmonsen »

em-bee wrote: post #59
WJW wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Dutch national news had an interview with the CEO of Boskalis, which is the company hired to unlodge the ship. They have one team on the ground atm and another building computer simulations exactly to calculate how much oil and ballast they can pump out (to lighten the ship up and make it easier to tow) without endangering the stability of the ship. Apparently they had a similar case (same size of ship) a few yea…

do you mean this case? https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/frachter-rammt-faehre-knapp-an-d... that was the very same ship EDIT: no, the incident needing 12 tugs was a different ship. see comment below.

Is that ship abnormally large or something or is this just a super wild coincidence?

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#137

Post by londons_explore »

BrianOnHN wrote: post #75
leesec wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb question but what about heavy lift helicopters moving containers off 1 by 1?

It's a lot of containers.

it's a quarter mile long. You can probably have 10 helicopters working at once while still keeping safe distances.

Each helicopter has a crew of 4 on the boat and 4 on the shore. They hook 4 chains to the 4 corner hoists of each container. Say it takes 1 minutes per container to affix the chains, 1 minute to fly to the sand, 1 minute to unhitch, and 1 minute to fly back. Thats a lot slower than agricultural helicopters, but nobody will be very practiced with this yet, so it'll be slower.

The entire ship could be unloaded with this method in 5.5 days. Perhaps less if not all the cargo needs unloading.

The job could be half done by now...

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#139

Post by Denvercoder9 »

bigfudge wrote: post #125
postingawayonhn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unloading is feasible, it would just take a couple of weeks. They just need a floating crane on each side and some barges to take the containers away.

Is there a reason they couldn't have a smaller crane on board and dump them over the side. Surely even losing the cargo would be cheaper than keeping it blocked at this point?

If you dump the containers over the side, you managed to remove a ship blocking the canal, but now it's blocked by containers.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#140

Post by dghlsakjg »

dcolkitt wrote: post #23
ampdepolymerase wrote: post #14

Had rockets not been so regulated, this problem could have easily been solved. It would not be cheap but with a 150million insurance budget it is doable. Egypt is losing 400million in trade every hour. The ship weighs 200 000 tons. You only need to drag it out of the sand, not bring it to LEO. Another option would be a lot of shaped charges but the side effects are much more catastrophic if things go wrong. In the ol…

At the very least, why aren't they using helicopters to take the containers off one-by-one. That would reduce the overall weight, and it'd be easier to move an empty ship than one weighed down by cargo.

The worlds highest capacity heavy lift helicopter can lift 44k lbs (russian M-26, estimated to be 20 in working condition). An empty 40 ft. container weighs 9k lbs. With a max loading of 66k lbs gross. The Ever Given has a capacity of 20k TEU, or 10k 40 ft. containers.

Being generous, you could move maybe 5 per hour. Probably 1 per hour would be realistic. But give them the benefit of the doubt and say they could move 20 per hour for some reason, including fuel and maintenance stops.

So assuming that they could work 24 hours per day, they could do 480 containers per day (again assuming that all of the containers are 22k lbs lighter than capacity). They should be able to get this helicopter unloading done in 20 days of around the clock work with a bunch of highly optimistic assumptions.

Plus they have to stay out of the way of the dozens of salvage workers trying to move the actual ship, while operating a soviet era machine in a VERY harsh desert environment with no infrastructure.

If they need the ship to float higher, they would start by removing ballast, fuel, crew water, etc.

Large salvage operations are notoriously expensive, tricky, dangerous, and often don't make sense to outsiders. There's a reason that there's really only about half a dozen firms worldwide that have the expertise and equipment to pull something like this off.

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