Eureka! Make the water sufficiently dense by dissolving salt or another chemical into it. And/or chilling it.
Is that ship still stuck?
331–340 of 1001 posts
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you build a temporary barrier around the ship and the section of the canal, bring in some massive pumps, and temporarily raise the water level around the ship? Edit: Something like this https://www.hydrologicalsolutions.com/aqua-barrier-cofferdam...
In the middle parts of the ship it is probably not grounded, so you might have ropes below the hull with large inflatable balloons on both sides below water level, to give the ship extra lift. Then on a high tide, with oil & water removed, maybe some dredging on the sides where it needs to rotate to, and.. go!
Maybe something like those air/water tanks they attached to the side of the Costa Concordia to float it [1].
But you would have to take great care to prevent it from rolling over, so you probably can't lift it up too far.
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#333I 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…
Exactly. I'm guessing weeks rather than days, and maybe more than that.
The best I can come up with is heavy lift helicopters to at least remove the front most containers to relieve some of the pressure but even that would be an enormous operation.
Anything else would require major construction especially if it is to reach more than just the first four or five rows which is likely not going to be enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-26
Can do up to 60 tons total weight for a bit. That should cover even the heaviest containers. At least, I hope it does, if not they're royally screwed.
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you build a temporary barrier around the ship and the section of the canal, bring in some massive pumps, and temporarily raise the water level around the ship? Edit: Something like this https://www.hydrologicalsolutions.com/aqua-barrier-cofferdam...
I've had the exact same idea but the canal bank is very shallow.. so you would have to build around the whole ship (as you said). This also seems like a major undertaking. I am excited to see how they will solve the problem though!
You might end up getting it stuck higher. Then what?
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can see it here: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000
Yes. I notice that the two Maersk freighters behind the Ever Given are no longer there. It looks like all traffic has been cleared from the canal on both sides. Zoom out. The north end of the Gulf of Suez looks like a parking lot. So does the Med north of Port Said. So does Fayed, the lake in the middle of the canal. Smit, the big Dutch salvage firm, has been called in and already has their first heavy equipment, a d…
> China's "Belt and Road" rail plan may pay off.
That’s great conspiracy theory fodder right there. :)
Edit: perhaps it’s not so far fetched, if the boat drew a giant penis before getting stuck.
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#336Had 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…
The ship weighs over 400 million lbs. Falcon Heavy has something like 5 million lbs of thrust at takeoff, but then each Falcon Heavy adds some weight. I'm not sure what type of fuel load it would need to lift something a few feet and drop it somewhere else? But you're probably going to need several hundred Falcon Heavys to move this ship.
Then you have to attach them all to the ship somehow? Hopefully all of the rocket exhaust doesn't blow a bunch of containers around or melt the ship or anything.
Then I guess hope that the ship has been engineered for a scenario where rockets are used to move it so that it doesn't come apart?
Sure, I can't imagine why all of that wouldn't take more than a few days.
If you mean using rockets to basically pull really hard on the ship and yank it out of the bank, then that's a little different - you still need several really big ones, but you can probably rip the ship apart just the same and make the problem 10x worse without quite as much effort.
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#337Comedy 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 a chance. 224,000 tons. But you could use those to lift containers off one-by-one. Then you still have to move the ship but maybe when it is unloaded it can be done.
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#338Earlier today By clicking on some "dots" queued up on that map I think that I saw a ship tagged to transport "livestock" => that might become a small tragedy if they don't manage to clear quickly the channel - those chicken/goats/dont_know_what might be due to die anyway once they reach their destination, but dying of hunger/thirst packed aboard a ship might be worse... :(
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#339The ship is named “Ever Given”, but the huge text on the side says “EVERGREEN”, which is confusingly similar. Does anyone know why?
Evergreen is the company, they probably just want to show that more then the ship name
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also - it's quite possible it'd further beach itself during the unloading unless you replaced the mass in an easily removable manner... To which end I'd like to suggest self-launching lead trebuchets.
I understand this is all not realistic, but since we're just spitballing here, before I realized how many containers we're even talking about here, I had rather wondered if lifting off a lesser number of containers in the right place would be exactly right to shift the weight/balance for the ship to get unstuck.
That might be the case - also, just for the serious - a less silly recommendation. This is what ballast does (sorta) and replacing the containers with water (i.e. in inflatable reservoirs) that can quickly be pumped out might be a reasonable way to Inidiana Jones your way into tricking the rolling boulder and/or listing vessel.