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Giant Ship Is Moved To and Fro to Break Suction: Suez Update

180 points| testfoobar | 5 years ago |bloomberg.com | reply

246 comments

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[+] BurnerBotje|5 years ago|reply
> Later on Monday morning, a second heavy tugboat arrives to pull the ship off completely. In addition, water will be sprayed under the ship with great force to wash away sand and clay. If it is not possible to clear the front of the ship in this way, containers may have to be unloaded from the front of the ship.

(Dutch source: https://www.trouw.nl/buitenland/vastgelopen-containerschip-s...)

[+] tda|5 years ago|reply
I fail to understand why they didn't/don't use the tugboats to wash the water away. Even small boats can cause a lot of scour with their bow thrusters along a vertical quay wall (which the Ever Given is in a way). The erosive power of a 16MW engine is really something to not be underestimated.
[+] sillysaurusx|5 years ago|reply
Impressively, https://istheshipstillstuck.com/ updated with a "Sort of?" which is accurate.
[+] paxys|5 years ago|reply
> It has cost us $56 billion

What if you add in the value of all the memes it has generated though? Definitely a net positive for the world overall.

[+] tomjohnneill|5 years ago|reply
That was a very stressful decision at 4:30am, so glad it was the right call.
[+] learningwebdev|5 years ago|reply
> The breakthrough in the rescue attempt came after diggers removed 27,000 cubic meters of sand, going deep into the banks of the canal.

Impressive. That's around 55,000 metric tons of wet sand, or a bit more than the mass of the Titanic.

[+] iamgopal|5 years ago|reply
And given the sand density, much larger volume.
[+] liquidify|5 years ago|reply
Is this due to U.S. military involvement? I remember reading they were sending dredging experts.
[+] IvanK_net|5 years ago|reply
Interesting. There are dozens of websites writing about this event, but users of Hacker News upvote the link, where you can not read an article without paying for it.
[+] josefresco|5 years ago|reply
A subscription to Bloomberg digital costs about $419/year.
[+] chrisseaton|5 years ago|reply
Please don’t complain about paywalls here - it’s against the guidelines and boring.
[+] dewey|5 years ago|reply
I can read it and I didn't pay for it. You probably visited the website too many times and it hit the paywall limit.
[+] jffry|5 years ago|reply
Interesting. You could attempt to self-serve with a workaround and share the result, but instead you chose to complain out loud.

Anyways here is a mirror if you can't read due to the paywall: https://archive.is/RL4my

[+] rozab|5 years ago|reply
Just turn off js or go incognito. Are you a hacker or not?
[+] msravi|5 years ago|reply
Who picks up the tab for all this (both for the work done to free the ship and the losses by Suez authorities and other ships)? The company operating the ship? The ship owner? The insurance company? Suez authorities?
[+] paxys|5 years ago|reply
I imagine right now the Suez Canal Authority because it's in their best interest to get traffic flowing again as soon as possible. Then once things are stable everyone involved will start suing each other.
[+] intsunny|5 years ago|reply
Likely the ships' insurers. According to this video, while there is a Canal pilot on board, the ship's captain has a "Master's Overriding Authority":

https://youtu.be/ltdHRdtEHE4?t=204

[+] wyldfire|5 years ago|reply
By default it will likely be the canal authority who was very motivated to recover the functionality of their waterway. They probably spent significant time and money getting the ship unstuck. And they'll likely try to recover it from the shipping company who owned the Evergreen^H^H^H^H^HGiven.

But if the canal authority's pilot was at the helm when it ran aground, there's likely to be some difficulty getting the shippers to pay without a court involved.

EDIT: ship name was incorrect

[+] TheChaplain|5 years ago|reply
From what I've read, normally it is a local pilot/agent that commands the ships through Suez and not the captain, so I guess the shipping company is off the hook.
[+] cheaprentalyeti|5 years ago|reply
OK, everyone, the ship's refloated, yoohoo! Now we can go back to Just In Time inventory, because there's nothing whatsoever that can go wrong now!
[+] krisoft|5 years ago|reply
I find your comment quite trite.

It can be boiled down to: Ha! Things can disrupt JIT operations, don't these bozos know that?

In reality these decisions are made by professionals armed with heaps of statistics to make the best decision. I'm a nobody who knows nothing, yet I understand that ships are sometimes late. It is sometimes caused by weather, or mechanical issues, or piracy, or war. I trust that the professional know this too and more. Why do you think you know better than them what fits their reliability guarantees and budget the best?

[+] tome|5 years ago|reply
I seem to recall that as originally conceived in the Toyota Production System, suppliers of Just In Time inventory were supposed to be sited in the same location as you. I wasn't able to find a reference for this though ...
[+] hef19898|5 years ago|reply
I would really be surprised if anything managed by JIT was on that ship. JIT is mostly done in the last step before assembly, and even there buffets are put in place. JIT works badly with demand fluctuations (the further upstream, the worse those get in a supply chain) and supply fluctuations. And even without a blocked canal, two weeks of delay with containers is pretty common. Weather, port congestion, customs,... you name it.

It is a quite common misconception that supply chains all run on JIT nowadays.

[+] koheripbal|5 years ago|reply
Much of the canal has two separate lanes. It's unfortunate that the ship was stuck in the section that had only one lane.

I wonder if there will be a project to create a 2nd lane.

[+] jojobas|5 years ago|reply
If you don't use JIT your competition will put you out of business before the next ship blocks Suez canal.
[+] DVk6dqsfyx5i3ii|5 years ago|reply
Perhaps the benefits of JiT inventory exceed the costs of occasional disruptions.
[+] usrusr|5 years ago|reply
My layman's intuition would suggest that once one end is free, it should be possible to "wiggle" the other end out. If they can rotate the hull into a more parallel position, couldn't they rotate it back, repeatedly, with a longitudal vector component in addition to pulling sideways, and pull the other end out a little with every direction change? I'd expect a sandy canal ground to have a quite considerable delta between static and dynamic friction.
[+] nextweek2|5 years ago|reply
Probably just me but it seemed overall poor reporting on the whole incident. News channels had "experts" basically reading Wikipedia facts.

Way too many economist were asked their opinions, which were all prefaced with "it could be". Never once did I see an interview with a container ship captain, civil or marine engineer.

Big News these days just seems to be about regurgitating shaky videos from social media.

[+] k__|5 years ago|reply
Will they build a second one for safety? Maybe through Israel?
[+] rsstack|5 years ago|reply
A second, completely separate one, would go through the Sinai peninsula and not Israel. But that's probably not needed: about half of the Suez Canal is dual-lane. It's probably more economic to dig a parallel canal in those single-lane sections than to start a brand new one.
[+] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
A great utilization of resonance. I wonder if they installed sensitive vibrational analytics to help understand the optimal frequency for dislodging.
[+] mkoubaa|5 years ago|reply
If we knew exactly where the ship contacted the sand and the weight of the containers we could easily mathematically model the vibrational modes
[+] gbil|5 years ago|reply
Seems that is in the canal center now and moving!
[+] perryizgr8|5 years ago|reply
I think they should widen the canal. It is too narrow for the behemoth ships that are going on it now.
[+] mkoubaa|5 years ago|reply
What good are all the ballistic missiles we're all stockpiling if we can't use them to widen a canal
[+] fiftyacorn|5 years ago|reply
What is the risk of rogue waves breaking ships taking the Cape route?
[+] HeyLaughingBoy|5 years ago|reply
Same as it always was. Ships take the Cape route every day.
[+] Denvercoder9|5 years ago|reply
Zero. Those ships are built to be ocean-going.
[+] sunsipples|5 years ago|reply
is the solution wider canal or shorter boats?
[+] VelNZ|5 years ago|reply
Wow... navigating to this link brings up:

1) 33%-height ad for IBM at the top. 2) 20%-height offer to subscribe on the bottom. 3) Overlay asking for my email address which greys out the article.

Scrolling down, there is a autoplay video on the right sidebar along with most read content and ads.

The whole page is so bloated it lags my 1 year old MacBook just scrolling down.