The Suez Canal is Blocked

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A handy list of what’s permissable.

https://maritime-connector.com/wiki/ship-sizes/

Suezmax are named after the famous Suez Canal . They are mid-sized cargo vessels with a capacity ranging between 120,000 to 200,000 DWT. They are designed to pass through the majority of the ports in the world. Currently the permissible limits for suezmax ships are 20.1 m (66 ft) of draught with the beam no wider than 50 m (164.0 ft), or 12.2 m (40 ft) of draught with maximum allowed beam of 77.5 m (254 ft).

says it’s 399.94 m long and 58.8 m broad. If the draft is 15.7 m, this would boot it out of both categories. Hmm.

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I find this works for most blockages.

This seems like it’s the worst interface imaginable:

The widget sort of works for catalogs, and other highly visual works.

But for text? Good grief!

If you aren’t going to pay attention to page layout, maybe you shouln’t force readers to use your preferred page layout.

The cross section of the canal is an almost comically squat isosceles trapezoid with the bottom being much narrower that the top, meaning less navigable room than at first glance and a greater chance to hump up on the shallow slope sidewalls. I imagine that heavily-laden, deep draft, slow-response monster cargo vessels have to be especially watchful in canals.

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And a blinding dust storm would not help that, I believe. Keep hearing about a power loss on board, but can’t seem to find confirmation. Sounds like it might have been the perfect combination of circumstances to completely gum up the works. The absolutely predictable unpredictable event, IOW.

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So much high-tech tomfoolery! This is what happens when you move away from go ol’ mule-based canal propulsion.

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Is there a reason they can’t use cables from the shore to winch it out of the mud? I’ve seen snow anchors used to gain as much traction as needed, seems like they could do the same in the sand.

Though it’s not clear where they might safely attach such cables to the ship.

I don’t have the tools to graph it on hand, but I suspect there is some sliding scale of draught/beam dimension, where the wider the ship is, the shallower its permissible draught, rather than ships just being restricted to those two exact limitations. It seems like the Ever Given would sit somewhere along that spectrum. It’s wider than the maximum allowed beam of 50 m for a 20.1 m draught, but it’s also narrower than the 77.5 m beam restricted to a 12.2 m draught. It’s only slightly over the lower beam maximum, but also much closer to the draught restriction for a 77.5 m beam.

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Needs more puppies

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i know you aren’t doing this but that photo reminds me of a lot of really bad takes about how they’re going about this. i see a lot of people who don’t understand the logistics of doing that excavation. the first thing is that there isn’t really enough room to put more than maybe one more excavator and i say maybe guardedly. there’s just not a lot of room to work there. the second thing is that even if there was room for more than one more excavator it is almost impossible to coordinate the efforts of more than two excavators digging in one hole.

i was watching a backhoe and an excavator digging a hole once. it was two guys who had worked together for a while and it was like ballet. maintenance brought their backhoe over to “speed things up” and it went from ballet to slam dancing. within ten minutes the three of them had crashed buckets five times and one crash tangled them up and it almost overturned one of the backhoes. they told the maintenance guy “thanks but no thanks, now get the fuck out of our way.”

maybe things have changed in the world of excavation since 1980 but i just had some thoughts.

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Maybe just dig a new canal around the ship. :rofl:

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I think a lot of casual observers are failing to understand the scale of the engineering problem here.

This boat is roughly the size of the Empire State building turned on its side and weighs 200,000 tonnes. That’s not the kind of mass most humans can even wrap their heads around. It also needs to be pulled into the canal instead of further toward the shore, so even if you could anchor a bunch of big winches in the sand you’d be pulling it in the wrong direction.

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I really liked this article: I Like That The Boat Is Stuck (from Stone Soup)

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Really? Even if you pulled from the opposite bank?

(This is not in reply to the size and mass part of your post, which I can see as the sticking point, as it were. Although, that said
 the size and mass also means that digging it out with a few tractors will take a very long time, so either way we’re talking either massive machines or massive amounts of time.)

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I imagine that everyone who needs to read the Rules of Navigation will have them in dead tree format.

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You’d need cables that were at least half a kilometer long and capable of bearing an incredible amount of weight, so not exactly a trivial engineering challenge either.

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