NPR: "It 'Might Take Weeks' To Free Ship Stuck In Suez Canal"

[Paul F.]

JoeH wrote:
And just how much force you can exert on the ship structure and not have something break or otherwise get damaged.

One of the pictures in a story about this shows a digger on shore near the bow of this ship. It is dwarfed, and it is not a small machine.

Oh and the ship is listed at over 220,000 tons.

Exactly! Ships DO break into pieces when pulled in strange ways by strange cables... That should be avoided.

[pRICE cUBE]

Filliam H. Muffman wrote:
In case anybody hasn't seen it...

That literally made e LOL.

[macphanatic]

One has to wonder if it was loaded heavier than it should have been. The ideal solution would be to carefully remove containers until it floated. That may be easier said than done though. It would probably require heavy lift helicopters and low wind conditions.

[cbelt3]

Back up the ships in line.
Sail in a heavy construction crane on a barge or ship, and a bunch of other barges. Unload the beast.

Yeah... that’s gonna take weeks to get all that hardware in place.

[wurm]

Sign of the times. At first glance my eyes saw "Free Ship" and I thought of Amazon Prime. That's embarrassing.

[N-OS X-tasy!]

RgrF wrote:
Well if you were to lay the Empire State Building on it's side and then ram it at 10-15 knots into a sandbank...

I read that this ship is equal in length to three ESBs.

EDIT: OK, that's wrong -- the LAT article I read issued a retraction: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/sto...ck-blocked

[Numo]

Nothing a few giant magnets couldn't solve. Maybe install inflatable lane bumpers in the future.

[N-OS X-tasy!]

SteveO wrote:
Sounds like this'll make a good excuse to raise gas prices.

Article I read today said they've already gone up in response to this incident.

[N-OS X-tasy!]

Paul F. wrote:
I don't know how many tens of thousands of tons the ship is, but I can "SWAG" that that many tens of thousands of tons, stuck in the mud, won't be budged by 8. Not saying the concept is flawed, just that it's gonna take more than 8. 80, maybe. And where to attach the cables?

Ship is 200,000 tons by itself and is loaded with a cargo weighting about as much.

EDIT: Corrected the tonnage after referring back to the article I read: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/sto...ck-blocked

[RgrF]

N-OS X-tasy! wrote:
[quote=SteveO]
Sounds like this'll make a good excuse to raise gas prices.

Article I read today said they've already gone up in response to this incident.
Spent $42 today to load 10 gals into the beast.