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The Suez Canal is currently not blocked
- Thread starter Malevolence
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Introducing The Suez Side Squad.
THe Sun apparently reported that it had a butt-load of sex toys.
So that's what Maccapacca means when he says "ironmongery".
Soldato
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yes there are, multiple ones but they're not designed to pull the dead weight of the boat plus the necessary force to free it from sticky sand. You'd need all the anchor points all pulled in a coordinated direction which again isn't really how the points will have been designed.
Yes, I understand the considerable additional force due to 'stiction' and thinking about it the ship would be moving under power to weigh anchor.
I was recalling the days I spent working with bucket dredgers. Using anchor winches to move forward and sideways to dig into the sea bed. Noisy animals. Tugs were used to run out the cables and underrun them in turn to pick them up again but the deck winches were massive and the loads very high. Not as high as would be required with Ever Given I agree.
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Who took the jam out of your doughnut?
Associate
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Is the canal single lane traffic only? Any plans to dual carriage way it?
Soldato
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Would the anchor point be reinforced enough, or is that only for against the wind in terms of strength.
Part of it is dual, the area where this ship got stuck was the Southern single canal section.
I imagine dualling the rest of it would probably be the most sensible option in terms of preventing this sort of thing happening again. I'm not sure how realistic or expensive that would be in engineering terms but given how much this has cost I'm sure they will want to mitigate the risk in future. Dualling it doesn't prevent a ship blocking it again (that's actually probably fairly likely given the ever increasing size of ships) but means if one side got blocked they could use the other side in the interim. The only other option I can see to prevent something like this would be to significantly widen the entire canal so that a ship couldn't get wedged in this way. But you'd be talking more than doubling the width in some sections. Probably just as expensive as building another parallel section.
Anchors, anchor chain and all the associated equipment (windlasses etc) on most ships are only designed to hold the ship in relatively calm conditions and are not designed to take excessive loads. Case in point, there are currently many cruise ships anchored off the south coast of the UK as the industry is temporarily shut down. A lot of them have had anchor related incidents (lost anchors, snapped chains, damage to windlasses etc) in bad weather over the winter as they are using the anchors outwith the parameters they are designed for. The Marine Accident Investigation Branch have actually just released a bulletin about that this morning.
Soldato
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It would make so much sense to to make it dual all the way, as they can used as One Way lanes.
Effectively doubling the capacity and income after a few years the cost would be paid back, and if anything does ever get stuck there is another lane to sort it.
Reminds me of how common it was for the offshore radio ships to snap anchor chains during stormy conditions.
Increasing the width of the canal enough to make it impossible for a container ship to get stuck would also run the risk of not working as intended due to ships being made bigger. Having a ship as big as you can reliably fill is the most cost-effective way of moving stuff in bulk. I know that the width of the Panama canal was a major factor in container ship size, so much so that the canal was a standard ship size. Panamax = maximum size for using the Panama canal. I don't know if the same is true of the Suez canal, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Making a complete second canal would, as you say, probably be the most sensible option for preventing this sort of thing happening again. But Egypt is noted for not spending money on the canal as it is. I doubt if they'd spend money on making the canal better than it is.
Just tell the U.S that there's oil under the canal so they can go give Egypt some 'freedom'....
Yep, the US would be the next logical choice considering the UK's utter failure at Suez back in the day. That was mainly because Egypt wanted to control the canal themselves, which was a very sensible desire, but the UK didn't like that! And don't forget the time Iran had a democratically-elected government and decided they no longer wanted their oil being stolen (by the UK). The UK's response to that? Regime change!
So the British government (who were too incompetent and cowardly to do it all by themselves) called on the CIA to help them oust the democratic Iranian government so that the UK could continue its economic rape of Iran for a while longer. All of that happened within living memory, and the UK still hasn't paid reparations, of course.