Ever Given - DIYers ideas ?

Thoughts of messy Martian kids munching Mars[tm] bars and carelessly dropping the wrappers, much to the annoyance of red planet environmentalists intent on keeping the planet red ...

Neither the mediterranean or red seas have particularly high tidal ranges.

My understanding, obviously incomplete, is that the spring tide is a nice to have and not a have to have: dredging, tugging and lightening are all in play at the moment and in due course some combination will be successful.

Block off the canal either side of it - say by jamming a ship across - and pump water into the blocked off area.

Bet they haven't tried pumping it full of helium. Or attach thousands of helium balloons. Then watch it fly out of the way.

Having seen massive island building-by-suction dredger in the middle east, that would appear sensible enough but far too slow.

The tide is ~4ft Getting the timing right could save an awful lot of dredging.

The ship structure is vulnerable to cracking under stress. I doubt they would want to exceed design loads. As it is the front and rear are perched up and the middle belly unsupported and so in tension.

I read an article they were concerned about tearing the plate in the course of any manoeuvre.

The article I posted I think said that. and wait for the spring tide.

I suspect if floatation fails on this attempt then it's containers off and perhaps wait for the next.

I don't think this loader, will be enough :-)

At least we can see the dredge is getting close, and maybe with the tide...

Rabie said that two tugboats will attempt to tow the Ever Given after dredging work removes from 15,000 to 20,000 cubic meters of sand."

Paul

There's a dredge getting very close to it right now. Fifteen meters away, getting close to the front bulb.

The question would be, can the dredge get close enough to remove enough material so it can float free. That was the question with some of the other dredges they have, which are more for open channel work and could not get into a confined space easily. The dredge that is on-station, is long and narrow. And has a relatively open framework.

And I don't see a barge for collected materials, so they're probably just moving the silt a bit to make room for the ship to leave. Rather than doing a proper dredging job.

And the detail around the front bulb of the ship, still does not look very good. The shore based equipment (the steam shovel) hadn't made much progress at all. If they moved larger equipment into place, something could collapse. The shore area is just not meant as a work area. The bank doesn't look like it's made of concrete or anything.

Their dredging equipment, they have a "booster unit", which is a giant water/sediment pump. And it has an 850mm orifice. If they didn't care about the damage it would do, they could shoot water at the bulb area, and wash sediment away from it. But doing so would damage the shoreline. And it's hard to tell from the pictures, what that shoreline can take in terms of abuse.

Paul

They need to be well anchored though. The great thing about tugs is that it is easy to change the direction of pull. Those who think of water as an insubstantial medium should remember that racing power boats can accelerate at 3g, significantly better than F1 cars (at least until they are going fast enough to generate downforce).

IIRC it is stuck in a region that is tidal. A few more inches may make quite a bit of difference.

Big helicopter?

"As of 2016, the Mi-26 still holds the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale world record for the greatest mass lifted by a helicopter to 2,000 metres (6,562 ft) ? 56,768.8 kilograms (125,000 lb) on a flight in 1982" (Wikipedia)

although its *rated* load only seems to be 20 tons

Set fire to it?

Can't some of these beasts carry tens if not hundreds of thousands of containers ?

Even a container every 10 seconds is going to take forever.

(Which does raise the question of how on earth these things are ever loaded and unloaded ....)

The class of the Ever Given 20,000 the largest seem to be 24,000

:-) and then get those ships un-jammed by jamming another pair of ships either side of the blockade ships and then un-jam those by ... It wouldn't take very long before all the ships in the fleet would be jammed in the canal ;-) If only the canal had locks.

In message snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>, snipped-for-privacy@aolbin.com writes

The problem with putting locks on a canal is that it limits the size of the vessels that can use it, and enlarging them can get very expensive, and if you don't you risk obsolescent. In addition to that, you need to replace the water that the locks use, so you either need reservoirs (not particularly practical in a place like Egypt), or lots of pumping (which gets expensive).

Adrian

They offer a video at the bottom of this.

I'm sure some piles could be driven into the ground.

I think that is what they're doing.

There's a spring tide coming up soon.

Might take until the following spring tide though.