"Ever Given" is new Titanic?

Quite the nightmare, but no doubt the best people available are on the job. I have wondered at times how they managed to build the canal way back when, with the machinery then available, but I guess it was a much narrower and shallower affair then, I don't know whether hard rock is/was a big part of the excavation.

 

The same Frenchman that did the Suez was hired to start the Panama and famously failed because the Suez was all soft sand, no locks, where as the Panama had to go through lots of rock in mountains and was gonna need locks.

"Canal of the Pharaohs" used to link the Med with Red Sea via the Nile which itself used to be a bigger river.
Fun Fact: one of the even older Pharaohs dug canals almost but not quite linking the Nile with Red Sea but didn't make the connection because such a link wouldn't do his nation any particular good geo-politically AND doing so would risk spoiling a lot of Nile fresh water. Later Canal had locks not for water level but to prevent salt from entering the Nile.

 

Look and laugh.

https://external-sjc3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php?d=AQFuFAYQafAVLWNM&w=584&h=500&url=https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/201689631861899264/824835908762337330/20210325_204309.jpg&ccb=3-4&_nc_hash=AQGFRvN8PIBh1cHO

 

Is their any tidal variation in the canal ? Presumably some.

 

yes, Today Saturday evening will be a huge rescue taking advantage of the high tide in the channel.
Ship owners apologise and launch plan to refloat https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/finance/video/ship-owners-apologise-launch-plan-070921253.html
If this attempt is not successful, I think that a large winch anchored offshore may work because it is more efficient than several tugboats put together. The cable vector should pull back the vessel so a widening of the channel astern of the ship is required.

 

I think you mean onshore...and you are correct, that one (or more) big multi-part winch should pull her free. The only issue from the salvors point of view is getting a big enough deadman to bury in the sand.

 

For a country that built great pyramids, they don't seem very good at moving heavy objects or organizing labor

Couldn't you just dam either side with dredges and dump trucks, pump the level up, then dredge and excavate the dams? Around here, they move more dirt than that to build a new McDonalds, and it's not like they have miles of haulage. My small town has enough equipment to dam both ends in about 4 days. Digging back out would take a bit longer, maybe ten days, using what is on hand. We could also have the ship unloaded in that time. All that would take is a $100 worth of yard sale signs. I don't understand why there aren't five or ten thousand people there working on this. Ten thousand people can offload that boat. Where's Khufu when you need him?

 

The pyramid builders were under a different franchise. Sweated labour !

 

The bank effect and the big boat blocking the Suez

• When water gets squeezed between a ship’s hull and a sand floor, it speeds up, and the ship settles into a squat: bow up, stern down
  
• Likewise, when a ship passes close to a bank the water speeds up, the pressure drops, the stern pulls into the bank
  
• The more water a ship displaces, the stronger the effect
  
• The specific engineering of container ships mean that they can’t get longer; they have to get wider, and they stack them taller
• According to a YouTube video the ship is moving north, with westerly winds, pushing it to the right.
  
• The ship has adjusted its heading to the left, into the wind
• Then the ship lurches left, into the wind, maybe because of a temporary lull, causing its beamy hull began to hug the windward bank
• Then, quickly, the bow shoots away from the bank; stern continues to hug the bank and move north; ship spins; bow bulb punches through the riprap

 

why can't they get longer? Port handling?

Some saying there is danger of toppling the boxes if yanked free. What sort of stability do these ships have when fully stacked? Doesn't look like much.

 

It depends how much fuel and ballast water they unload.

 

PhilSweet's idea was an interesting one, I wonder just how far below the surrounding terrain, the canal water level is, though. I know strong cross winds have been mentioned as the cause of the catastrophe, which might just be the costliest ship grounding ever, but no advice as to what else contributed, it is usually the case that when things go horribly wrong it is multi-factorial, and an unusual sequence of failures, like a row of lemons on the slot machine co-inciding, are required to bring about such a result.

 

I'm not a Earth Mover guy but IIRC its a lot easier to deposit extracted dirt into a depression than to pile it up higher and higher so if nothing else there should be every piece of equipment in Egypt just digging a hole sorta next to where the bow is beached, just to make any later efforts more effective.

I'm also thinking fire-hoses dangled from the bow with heavy pipe at the end to keep the blast directed down to hydraulically mine the sand away. Pretty sure all big ships have on-board fire-hose pumps for using seawater to douse fires and generally rinse the ships, and so do most tug boats.

 

Without knowing the profile of the canal cross-section, the "right" strategy can't be deduced, I am sure they have all the soundings needed to work out what needs to be done, one wonders if the boat is grounded at both ends, and the thing sits there when a very low tide comes along......whoops.

 

This was posted by Kukri on the YBW Forum re Ever Given in post #409 on page 21 of this thread -
Suez blocked. https://forums.ybw.com/index.php?threads/suez-blocked.562419/page-21
It suggests that the bow might be more deeply buried than what was initially thought?