dnautics 2021-03-25 21:41 UTC link

Principle of maximal irony prediction: the ship rolls over while trying to free it and the suez gets littered with containers, takes even longer to clear it.

gm3dmo 2021-03-25 21:43 UTC link

Smit salvage have got this. I just hope they had enough notice to to take their film crew with them:

https://www.youtube.com/c/SmitSalvageTowage/videos

blhack 2021-03-25 21:45 UTC link

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 really stuck.

Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship. You're basically asking to build a port in the middle of the egyptian desert. That isn't going to happen.

It's really stuck. It's probably going to take a couple of weeks to get it unstuck.

elihu 2021-03-25 21:52 UTC link

I suppose I'll kick off the usual "why don't they just do X" thread.

It seems to me that if they can't move it by any normal means, they could just start pushing cargo containers overboard and fish them out until it's light enough to move.

I could also a lot of plausible reasons why they wouldn't do that:

- it wouldn't work (no equipment to move containers)

- the ship's owner doesn't want to do that and no one has the authority to force them

- the ship's owner wants to do that, but the owner of the cargo doesn't want them to

- the cost of lost cargo is more than the cost of delaying other ships

- it would take too long or be too messy to clean up

qbasic_forever 2021-03-25 21:54 UTC link

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?

anigbrowl 2021-03-25 22:00 UTC link

Needs a counter for ongoing cost. An experienced military logistics person I know estimated yesterday that the bill for this is up to about $40 billion already.

dang 2021-03-25 22:07 UTC link

Recent and related:

Suez canal blocked by a massive ship - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560319 - March 2021 (419 comments)

Also ongoing:

It 'Might Take Weeks' to Free Ship Stuck in Suez Canal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585480 - March 2021 (23 comments)

Suez Canal: How are they trying to free the Ever Given? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586278 - March 2021 (44 comments)

barbegal 2021-03-25 22:37 UTC link

It will be weeks before this ship is free.

Fuel and oil can be pumped out but that only makes up a fraction of the total weight of the vessel. Containers can be unloaded but again the lightest will be at the top so a significant number will need to be removed to make a big enough difference. And unloading them will be a slow process. You can maybe unload a few per hour with helicopters. There doesn't exist any infrastructure which could get to that location and lift off containers. You could build a custom crane barge but that would take at least a month to fabricate and get to the site. The easiest way to remove containers will be using cutting equipment, winches and possibly explosives. It won't be easy and will likely take several weeks to unload a significant number of containers, the ship and containers will be damaged in the process.

That leaves dredging the sand under the ship. Again the infrastructure to do this rapidly doesn't exist. You can dig out the sand around the ship but there is a huge amount that the ship is resting on. It will take specialist dredging equipment to start removing this sand.

phenylene 2021-03-25 22:49 UTC link

My non-techie wife just said to me, "We need to NFT this situation somehow."

She's been down that rabbit hole ever since reading about the Beeple piece.

zepearl 2021-03-25 23:01 UTC link

Earlier 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... :(

testfoobar 2021-03-25 23:19 UTC link

Moving sand is easier than moving a ship+20K containers or removing the 20K containers in hopes of refloating the ship.

So the easiest solution would be to widen the canal at this point - where the ship is currently located and where the ship will need to go as it refloats and turns. Move the banks further back. In effect create a place with enough room for a ship of this size to turnaround.

The canal isn't that deep. Dredgers can be brought on both banks in front and behind the ship. Four dredging teams ought to knock this out pretty quickly.

ajb 2021-03-25 23:23 UTC link

Just another non-expert, but I wonder if the simplest approach might be to pump water under it to wash away the sand it's beached on.

Googling, it seems that this is a recognised technique for dredging: https://www.iadc-dredging.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/fac... Whether it works might be dependent on what kind of soil its sitting on and whether the current is strong enough to take away the dislodged particles.

I guess it would also be hard to work out exactly what you've removed and hence whether you leaving the ship in a position that will stress its structure too much.

jacob2484 2021-03-26 00:05 UTC link

Quite the arrogance here of mostly software devs trying to out -solutionize marine/shipping experts who undoubtedly have been consulted and are already looking for the quickest way to resolve the situation. With billions of dollars in stake, I'm sure even the most expensive experts are involved.

tomjohnneill 2021-03-26 00:09 UTC link

Site author here, I guess this is why the New York Times API keeps hitting rate limits.

ineedasername 2021-03-26 01:24 UTC link

Every question with a binary answer should have its own website like this. I would, in particular, like a website for every room in my house with the question "are my car keys in this room?"

Then I would create an rss feed of each site and subscribe to them.

nabakin 2021-03-26 01:24 UTC link

A bit off-topic but I think worth noting. The VesselFinder map on this website is incredibly smooth and responsive! Every time I open up Google Maps, I feel how bloated it is despite running on the Pixel 5, Google's very own latest flagship device! It seems to me Google doesn't care much about Maps' performance if I feel more comfortable navigating maps using some random, web embed. After looking around the embed a bit, turns out it's powered by OSM! Even though I have never used OSM before, I should have guessed. Truly nice work on this OSM and VesselFinder. It's honestly euphoric to find software which performs so well despite not having access to billions of dollars in resources.

throwawaybutwhy 2021-03-26 04:16 UTC link

Fun facts:

1. The owner is Japanese

2. The operator is Taiwanese

3. The flag is Panamanian

4. The cargo is Chinese

5. The insurer is British

6. The crew is Indian

7. The canal is Egyptian and was built with forced labor by the French

8. The dredgers/salvage op managers are Dutch

cycomanic 2021-03-26 09:06 UTC link

Reading through the comments where people come up with solutions, really shows to me that software engineering education is lacking in terms of teaching general engineering principles.

Some of these proposals can be seen as being completely off reality by some basic order of magnitude estimations. Which is something that should be front and center of every engineering education.

lucideer 2021-03-26 12:11 UTC link

> It has cost us $30 billion dollars, so far...

This valuation is based on Lloyd's list's valuation of Suez traffic at ~$10 billion / day, but surely that would require all traffic to be permanently lost (rather than delayed) to add up to a concrete loss. Spoilage might be an issue with some cargo, plus there's other costs to delay, but I can't imagine the eventual loss will be anything close to $10 billion / day (excepting obvious large unknowns like market speculation).

Balgair 2021-03-26 15:02 UTC link

One missing part of the discussion is how this large ship got stuck. Brenden Greely of The Financial Times had a good possible take the other day on the Bank Effect:

https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d...

Essentially, Bernoulli's Principle makes these large ships susceptible to jack-knifing in narrow canals.

Faster moving water creates a lower pressure zone. Water moves fastest near the stern of the boat. This is why the bow will tend to rise when a ship is moving quickly; the stern can bee seen as being sucked down almost.

In the Suez the 24m deep bed of the canal makes the water move very fast near the stern of the ship. This will also occur near the banks of the canal. With these very large ships, the effect is more pronounced, as there is less cross-sectional area for the water to move past.

If a ship gets near the banks, then you'll get the fast low pressure water acting on the bank-side of the stern and the bottom. Add your force vectors up, the ship torques, and does a 'wheelie' off the bank, jack-knifing the canal.

The big problem here is that these superships all are susceptible to this. It's a matter of hydrodynamics. The bigger the ship, the worse it gets. Meaning that economics comes crashing into physics, and we all know who will win that fight.

WJW 2021-03-25 21:44 UTC link

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 years back on the Elbe in Germany, in the end it took 12 (!) of the largest tugs they had to get it loose.

brundolf 2021-03-25 21:54 UTC link

Perhaps most importantly: the channel is only a couple dozen meters deep, which is part of the problem. Dropping a bunch of containers down there would almost certainly create a new obstacle for this and other ships

JumpCrisscross 2021-03-25 21:57 UTC link

> they could just start pushing cargo containers overboard and fish them out until it's light enough to move

Light boats are less stable. One of the few that could make this situation worse would be the damn thing capsizing.

sixstringtheory 2021-03-25 21:58 UTC link

It has a 20,000 container capacity, so if it's full and you could unload them at a rate of 1 per minute (assuming multiple choppers) it would take 2 weeks with no stopping, but I assume the frequency would be much lower than that so you're talking possibly months to unload even a fraction of them.

dshibarshin 2021-03-25 22:04 UTC link

The carrier can announce a general average [1] which allows it to throw the containers overboard if they believe it will help the ship get moving.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_average

eCa 2021-03-25 22:07 UTC link

If I understand [1] properly, the Chinook can lift 13 tons[2].

The Evergiven's maximum weight is 200000 tons. So that would be 15000+ Chinooks lifting it. A sight to behold.

Added: Only about 1200 were ever produced, so that won't fly.

[1] https://www.army.mil/article/137584/ch_47_chinook_helicopter

[2] 26000 pounds

01100011 2021-03-25 22:08 UTC link

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...

aidenn0 2021-03-25 22:09 UTC link

They said "days to weeks" for how long it will take, so they got plenty of time to film it.

qbasic_forever 2021-03-25 22:09 UTC link

Oh what about magnetism? Could we wrap the ship in wire and send so much current through that it repels against the Earth's magnetic field and shoots itself right into the atmosphere? Basically building a giant rail gun. Might need a small nuclear power plant or two to make it feasible.

Denvercoder9 2021-03-25 22:10 UTC link

That might be the total value of impacted shipping, but nobody is going to get a $40 billion bill for this.

neartheplain 2021-03-25 22:15 UTC link

Better Cold War option:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

The ship’s a total loss, but Egypt also gets a new lake!

samizdis 2021-03-25 22:27 UTC link

> Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship.

It seems, though, that a partial unloading is being considered by a professional in the field according to quotes in an article in The Guardian [1]:

However, Peter Berdowski, CEO of Boskalis, a specialist dredging company that has sent a crew to the scene, said data so far suggested “it is not really possible to pull it loose” and that the ship may need to be unloaded. “We can’t exclude it might take weeks, depending on the situation,” Berdowski told Dutch television.

He said the ship’s bow and stern had been lifted up against either side of the canal. “It’s like an enormous beached whale. It’s an enormous weight on the sand. We might have to work with a combination of reducing the weight by removing containers, oil and water from the ship, tugboats and dredging of sand.”

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/25/suez-canal-blo...

jacquesm 2021-03-25 23:04 UTC link

Who else? They'll get the job done but I don't think they are going to accept any deadline.

the8472 2021-03-25 23:31 UTC link

> Again the infrastructure to do this rapidly doesn't exist.

The UAE used several sand-vacuuming ships to build their artificial islands, wouldn't those do the job?

BrianOnHN 2021-03-26 00:05 UTC link

Can someone explain why dredging alone isn't sufficient? Is it too slow?

float4 2021-03-26 00:11 UTC link

Cool! How much traffic are you handling at the moment / at peak?

dahdum 2021-03-26 00:27 UTC link

Looks to me like everyone here is just having fun theorizing about it, I don’t see much, if any, real arrogance.

elihu 2021-03-26 00:27 UTC link

Even more whimsical option: Evangelion is set in 2015, which means if we were following their projected technology timeline, we could just unload the ship by Eva. Probably unit 0, because Rei tends to get the crappy jobs. Not Asuka, she'd turn it into a contest of who could sink the most tugboats by throwing containers at them or something like that.

The Evas can be airlifted anywhere in the world, but IIRC they have about five minutes of battery power. So, the biggest logistical problem would be getting suitable power on site. What are the voltage/current/frequency requirements of an Eva charger? How many months/years would it take to charge an Eva with a J1772 port or whatever they use in that part of the world? Looks like the nearest Tesla superchargers are in Israel and Jordan, which is too far even if they were compatible. Maybe NERV has a mobile generator?

The Jet Alone folks could put in a competing bid, but their robot would just get sabotaged again.

ngokevin 2021-03-26 00:30 UTC link

Better than the coronavirus takes I've seen from software devs...

davesque 2021-03-26 00:34 UTC link

Maybe people just find it to be an interesting problem and are having fun thinking out loud about it.

thereisnospork 2021-03-26 01:01 UTC link

>Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship. You're basically asking to build a port in the middle of the egyptian desert. That isn't going to happen.

I say build a trebuchet on deck and start launching containers into the desert.

banana_giraffe 2021-03-26 01:10 UTC link

I'm not sure it's arrogance. I'm reading these theories and suggestions as a fun thought experiment. I also like comparing the real solution, whatever it is, with my memory of the arm-chair solutions to see how far off the mark they are.

divbzero 2021-03-26 01:21 UTC link

Could anyone end up being liable for this? For example, could delayed ships sue canal operators who in turn sue the owners of Ever Given? Alternatively, would an event like this be covered by any insurance policies?

kristofferR 2021-03-26 01:41 UTC link

It's using OpenLayers.

https://openlayers.org/

lhorie 2021-03-26 02:26 UTC link

This is a really good example of how terrible people are at judging scale. Some numbers getting thrown around downthread say there's something to the tune of 10,000 40ft containers. To give a bit of a sense of perspective, that's like trying to clear out some 200 football fields worth of semi-trucks, except they are stacked, packed full of stuff, and have no gas or wheels. And all of them are perched atop a ship that is twice as tall and there's no suitable cranes or similar equipment anywhere near the vicinity.

If you ever seen a truck up close, you probably have an idea how tricky it is to maneuver even a single functional one on open flat ground. I can't even begin to imagine what it would take to move off even a fraction of 10,000 equivalents of bricks of the size of trucks, let alone budge the massive ship off of the sand banks.

mark_mart 2021-03-26 02:29 UTC link

Should we also count the effort needed to put these containers back to vessel? Same for fuel.

jldugger 2021-03-26 02:48 UTC link

... but I think we've also identified a market for a Poly Bridge style game where you try to unstuck a containers ship from the canal in increasingly absurd ways.

mark_mart 2021-03-26 02:53 UTC link

I hope she reads the article about Beeple fraud. Buyer and owner of that art are basically investors in the same nft comp, there is no transaction either. It's just a PR.

meowster 2021-03-26 02:57 UTC link

Maybe some kind of trustless crypto lotto about when the ahip will be freed?

jahewson 2021-03-26 03:43 UTC link

That’s an O(n) car key search, if you instead asked the question “are my car keys in this half of the house?” you could perform a binary search O(log n).

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