Ship stranded in Suez Canal shifts, but not before spawning some choice tech memes The ship that’s blocked the Suez Canal for almost a week has shifted. That Ever Given moved in the early hours of Monday, Egyptian time, seems certain as footage from the scene has emerged. Sunup in the #Suez & things indeed look different. Video of the #EVERGIVEN's new, less meme-worthy position.pic.twitter.com/qK6dOod7AF …
It's just the shouty version of "us" - we are Europeans after all.
I don't think that is a sentiment that would be shared by this crowd...
For example, plug in Seattle (Washington) and Tokyo. Or Oakland (California) and Shanghai.
Both routes go through Panama and Suez. WTF? In fact, using ports.com I can't find a single shipping route that crosses the Pacific!
Here's a good one: Port of Petropavlovsk (Kamchatka) to Port of Anchorage (Alaska).
That way you would have to cross the date line, and ports.com transit time calculations would flip upside down. Or something.
Apparently a lot of date-time code is built using homegrown libraries and dubious algorithms. Because this kind of bugs still occur way too often.
I know it would be expensive, but given the volume of traffic you would think that a second canal would be cost effective so that you have two-way 24/7 flow - not just as a backup.
Of course the fact that a second lane could be used with temporary traffic lights if this happened again would be a bonus.
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Spike Milligan was there first. From The Great Trans-Africa Canal...
Seagoon: "With the closing of the canal, British aeroplanes are forced to fly around the Cape. It is my intention to cut a canal across Africa, so that they can fly over that."
Crun: "Fly over a canal? But if they crash, they'll all drown!"
Seagoon: "But they can't in this canal - there's not going to be any water in it!"
If they were big enough for containers, and extended to Shenzen ...
Well, they already did that, kind of. They've lopped off the top half of the pipe as well as most of the bottom half, leaving two parallel metal strips, and attaching them to some reinforced concrete bars to keep them from wobbling and moving around. So now you can't really put the containers in them, but they've solved that by providing wheeled platforms neatly running on top of these strips.
Saves quite a bit of material.
there are pipelines being planned from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other oil producing areas to the East Mediterranean.
At least one shipment of solar panels was in the Ever Given, and quite likely a few more have been held up by this, prolonging the reliance on fossil fuels.
It isn't, but then again...
The idea that something that clearly isn't a meme can then become recognised as something that it isn't, is therefore exhibiting textbook memetic behaviour.
(Caveat - I feel your pain, but sadly I feel that battle might already be lost, "hacker"-style)
I think the short-short version is this. There were high winds causing difficult steering conditions. Then they had an engine failure and a generator failure. There wasn't a backup generator, so while they had no power, they had no steering and were adrift and the wind drove them into the wall.
Interestingly it appears very few ships have backup generators. The bean counters see no need for redundancy. But I do wonder how much money was spent on freeing this ship and how much money was lost in stopped commerce, and how that compares to the cost of a backup generator.
It has 4 x 5600HP auxiliary 'backup' generators.
Unfortunately it's a very big sheep in a very narrow shallow canal.
It's a ship, so can only steer when it's moving - except for a couple of tiny (2500HP) bow thrusters,
It's in a narrow canal so when it's moving it gets sucked toward one side by hydrodynamics stuff,
It's in a shallow canal so when it's moving it gets pulled down at the stern which affects the steering
It's the size of a small town, has flat sides the height of a tower block and it was a touch windy.
On the whole, like reversing an articulated trailer down a hairpin bend on ice in a hurricane
Exactly. A certain state in the US decided to save $$ by firing all its interpreters. So instead of paying a local interpreter to spend his day doing local jobs, they paid people like me 4 hours travel time plus the 2hr minimum for each job. A local college apparently got wind of this scheme, fired its staff interpreters, and hired through an agency. Bottom line: A class formerly covered 3 man hours of staff was replaced 8 man hours of higher cost agency interpreters. But different budget lines were used so money was "saved". I'm sure someone got a huge bonus in both cases.
This comment in a thread elsewhere has, IMO, a solid analysis of the mishap. A large part of it is the strong tailwind, requiring the Ever Given to go through the canal ar a speed well in excess of R17 nearly double of the allowed maximum, to keep steerage way. Another part is that the helmsman was clearly not a PID controller.
The long and short of it is that they shouldn't have entered the canal under these conditions, or if they absolutely had to, only with a tug attached to the stern which allows control of the vessel somewhat like an outboard motor instead of relying on forward speed to create the required amount of flow past the rudder.
This is the real $$$ problem.
The canal is really too small for the biggest ships, but makes most of its money from the biggest ships.
The route from China to Europe is economical for the biggest ships, which is why they get bigger - currently only really limited by the canal. So if you increase the size of the canal you will increase the size of the ships. If you limit when they can use it because of weather you lose $$$
If you limit when they can use it because of weather you lose $$$
If ships need to hold for a day, maybe two, until the wind has shifted or sufficiently subsided, they'll pass through the canal anyway and the fees will go into the Egyptian coffers, only a few days later. It's when those conditions persist for quite a bit longer that some may choose to go round the Cape, although that would replace the canal fees with having to buy a few extra gallons of bunker oil, plus one more week of transit time. The Canal Authorities may also allow passage if the ship is assisted by a Rent-a-Tug or two; it's their canal, they can set the rules, and since last week all shippers are well aware why those rules would be there. I expect bills with Very Large Numbers will soon be exchanged between the SCA, Evergreen, Shoei Kisen Kaisha and the shippers delayed by this mess, or rather their insurers and legal representatives.
Was fond of this epic verse myself - https://twitter.com/krfabian/status/1374798847650709504 - reproduced here in full for all the earlier posters who are struggling to figure out how hyperlinks work:
my name is Boat
and wen im tired
(but shipping werk
is still required)
then all I want
is lyttle snooze
i turn to side
i blok the Sooz
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