391–400 of 593 posts
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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.
> They run the canal at maximum capacity indefinitely We have to stop doing this with all of our critical systems, it causes hiccups to be so costly.
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It's already a trip halfway around the world at something like 30 km/h. If you're transporting goods that are that sensitive, you're likely doing it by air already. Ships get delayed all the time for various reasons.
The ship will still likely be anchored for hull inspection, perhaps in Bitter Lake. That may take a couple of days at best, and an indefinite stranding if serious problems are discovered. Also crew change is likely because of on-going investigations, and that will be tricky with the on-going mariner crunch. There's not a lot who are qualified to run a ULCV, especially one straight out of an accident.
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I’d be surprised if they aimed for their ship to arrive n days before the spring tide in case it got stuck. That just doesn’t sound like an efficient operation. In this case the luck was that the high tides were relatively high when it was stuck. If we were in a neap tide, we might have had to wait longer for a high enough tide to get the ship out. (But maybe if tides were lower it wouldn’t have gotten so stuck) P.S.…
> I’d be surprised if they aimed for their ship to arrive n days before the spring tide in case it got stuck. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that after the ship got stuck, they certainly incorporated the tides into their plan for how to unstick it. If the tides had been less amenable, they would have come up with a different plan. So their plan didn't get "lucky", their plan was predicated on the tides being…
That’s the point and the absolute bit of luck. Without the high tides they likely wouldn’t have been able to get it unstuck as quickly. Search for slope/fill volume calculation charts - the amount of fill required to be removed as you go deeper is logarithmic, NOT linear.
It was VERY lucky they had the highest tides possible.
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It's been blocked before but for a lot longer (from late 1956 to early 1957—about five months) during the Suez Crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis That was a really big deal—more so than this one, I still remember the daily radio news reports and huge newspaper headlines from when I was a young kid. It was an international crisis that dragged on for months and months.
I think this incident really highlights how easily the Suez can be blocked. A well hidden explosive charge on a container ship in the canal could cause a multi-month blockage - perhaps longer. It would probably be smart to dig a 2nd channel.
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There appears to be little "high-end engineering." Just a high tide and a bunch of tug boats.
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.
Oh hey, they fixed it, - without destroying or imposing significant additional damage to any of the cargo - without destroying or imposing significant additional damage to the ship - without taking multiple weeks - without needing to ship a trillion dollars'+ worth of equipment halfway around the world It's refreshing to see high-end engineering performed so competently.
Why wouldn't it be more cost-effective or unreasonable to destroy the ship?
- A sunken super container ship in the canal, rather than a floating one. Removing the wreckage would be at least an order of magnitude more work than floating the thing away.
- Thousands of containers floating / sunk in the canal. How much damage can one of those do to the propeller of a ship?
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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).
This is where someone steps in and says something to the tune of "Whatever price you're willing to pay is by definition reasonable" and completely ignore the ethical/moral issues with essentially holding someone's life for ransom by charging the maximum price they can get for something they need to survive.
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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).
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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.
Smit is now part of Boskalis, which is a big marine engineering firm. They have dredgers, heavy lift ships, tugs, and barges, which are useful both for marine construction and for salvage. So the fleet can do other things between crises.