Compare the red/black line on the ship's hull and the water line. Under normal conditions, the red/black line is parallel to the water across the length of the ship:
I’m not a ship engineer but I do know that ships are not built to be suspended from the ends. I guess in the worst case the hull breaks which would mean the canal to be blocked for quite a while.
That's usually only a real problem when the ship is suspended in the air, between wavetops. This one is still in the water, though maybe it has a little less support in the center than normal
Ships actually are designed to be suspended from the ends. Ocean going vessels are going to experience wave crests which can be any length apart, including the full length of the ship.
Maritime traffic dropped significantly during mid-2020 but has largely recovered. For example, Singapore's stats for Feb 2021 are basically flat year-on-year for container throughput.
Super-ships emit ~5g_Co2/Ton/km on average[1], while railway is 2-35g, air transport is 700-3000g and truck transport is 100-2000g.
Surprisingly, the bigger the boat the more effective. We tend to have a bias against larger machines, but often they can be the cleanest in proportion.
There's nothing surprising about large ships being more efficient. But a big issue is that many ships burn dirty fuel. Apparently there are no fuel standards in international waters.
As for the comparison to trains, it matters a lot whether you're talking about diesel or electric trains. Most train lines in Europe are electrified, and as electricity production switches to solar/wind, it may actually end up being cleaner than ships. (Although work is also being done on making ships cleaner. But new international laws are probably needed to get everybody on board.)
The real issue, though, isn't no much whether the transport happens by boat or train, but that it happens at all. The scale of global shipping is this big because everything is produced on the other side of the world. Big ships make that transport more efficient, but a more egalitarian global economy that didn't create incentives for companies to seek out every low-wage country and tax haven, would make local manufacturing more attractive and reduce global shipping.
Isn't the problem that ships are burning heavy oil instead of diesel or similar? CO2 isn't the main worry afaik, it's the rest that gets blasted unfiltered into the atmosphere and the left over sludge that gets illegally dumped into the sea.
The upper limit of the sulphur content of ships' fuel oil was reduced to 0.5% (from 3.5% previously) - under the so-called "IMO 2020" regulation prescribed in the MARPOL Convention. This significantly reduces the amount of sulphur oxide emanating from ships.
5g per km-tonne adds up to a lot though doesn't it.
"Maritime transport emits around 940 million tonnes of CO2 annually and is responsible for about 2.5% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (3rd IMO GHG study)."
And it makes sense if you think about it - as you scale up, the ammount of fuel you can carry goes up roghly by cube while structure mass, forming a shell effectively arround the fuel, goes up by square of size of the rocket.
Similar things for air resistance - as you scale up yuour rocket the front part creating the most drag will scale more slowly than the volume of the rocket that goes to fuel, payload and structure.
No wonder Starship is already at 9 meters of width and 18 m has been mentioned as a possible future upgrade. Its already bigger than the massive 66+ meter high medieval watchtower in my home town yet it can fly to sub orbital speeds without its first stage booster (which is even bigger)!
For pressure vessels like rockets, the mass of the structure and the mass of the fuel scale together as far as square-cube reasoning goes. The surface area of the structure scales with the square while the volume of the fuel scales with the cube, but the thickness of the cylinder walls must also increase, so you end up with cube vs cube.
Possibly road conditions and distance. A truck moving goods around a city will be much less efficient (stop-start traffic) than a truck moving goods over a long distance between cities (likely mostly highway).
"I've no idea how long a typical Suez transit is."
For yachts it is (supposed to be) two days. It's one day to Ismailia on either way and then one for the rest. (The paperwork however, may take longer, but can be arranged in advance.) See more at https://www.noonsite.com/report/suez-canal-transit-informati...
walrus01 linked a video here yesterday [0] of a ship transit. For a ship it takes 11 to 16 hours, including stop on Great Bitter Lake in the middle of the canal.
Look at a globe. You'll notice that the water around the tip of South America/South Africa is one of the few bands of the Earth completely unbroken by landmass.
That's a lot of fetch for wind, which transfers energy to the ocean's surface, which travels as waves, which build up because there's no land damping from west to east. Throw in the Antarctic Circumpolar current and weather systems interacting with the Benguela current an Agulhas current... That's a lot of energy getting put into a relatively tiny band of water.
The Cape of Good Hope was previously known as the Cape of Storms based on the aforementioned confluence of forces generally making sea states miserable. The Good Hope part was what putatively happened after you got through it, and the seas you'd have to worry about would generally be calmer.
Hoping I'm not misreading and this is what you're after - basically, less predictable weather that is more prone to suddenly changing when going that route and also naturally given the extended period of time involved. Longer it take to go around, the more time for potential sea conditions that large container ships may not be safe in.
There are professionals, I don't know how it works at suez but we have people called "Havarie Kommisar", they are the guys brought in by insurances to document and certify accidents involving transportation.
Niche, but very important to participants in the market. There is a growing industry of cargo and vessel tracking SaaS solutions (including https://Vortexa.com)
Fond memories. I once tracked a ship carrying a couple of containers that were urgently needed driving in circles in the English Channel for two weeks.
My partner and I shipped our furniture from the US to Europe for an international move. We were tracking the ship going back and forth between Hamburg and Copenhagen for weeks. Turns out the moving company gave us the wrong ship number, and our stuff had been waiting for us in the destination port.
Here is another accident of the "Ever Given" in Hamburg [0] in which a harbour ferry suffered a total loss after being rammed by her. Supposed cause was an unfortunate combination of slow speeds and severe wind which seems to be a difficult situation for ships as tall as these.
Maybe a similar combination of events happened here?
Can't see the flag, because the whole page is blocked by some BS (presumably in german). Blocking own content or creating obstacles to see it ... what can be more ridiculous. I just close such web pages and never come back.
Same. I had this idea of making a special pi-hole variation where instead of blocking the domains, it actually redirects me to a page of my own creation that explains that the given domain was blocked by me due to [intrusive popups, hiding the article behind a click so it can trigger some JS, whatever other dark patterns]. It's hard to manually remember all the domains to not bother clicking links to :)
The easiest way to achieve this on a desktop browser (or Firefox for Android) may be to add custom, named filter lists to uBlock Origin. The name will show up on the block page ("Found in: $LIST_NAME") It's not network-wide, but at least you can host your lists on the web to keep them up to date across your devices (and to share your efforts with others!).
I saw a cookies consent popover followed by a “oh no ad block” popover.
I can’t get worked up against them for wanting to get paid, even though I regard adverts as parasites of time, energy, and bandwidth and won’t disable my ad blocker for them — I don’t have solutions, just the aphorism about two wrongs.
The first notification informes you about the cookies the website is using. You need to agree to the use of the cookies to continue. This is mandatory by european law.
But I agree with you that the placement and the fact that the banner blocks the whole website is unconvenient.
The second notification tells you to turn your ad-blocker of or to watch a video instead.
> You need to agree to the use of the cookies to continue. This is mandatory by european law.
No, it is not mandatory by European law. The myth persists.
The site can use essential cookies or no cookies just fine, with no banner required at all. Nothing.
If they decide to use non-essential cookies, for example privacy-intrusion tracking cookies to follow your activity around the web for advertising, then they need to notify you of this tracking and obtain consent. You have a right to know, after all, and you might prefer to exercise your rights by declining consent. But nothing requires it to be a large banner, and nothing requires the "reject all" button to be difficult to find.
I know, I should have clarified that. But to be honest, most newspapers use more then the essential tokens.
As I wrote, I find the blocking of the website and the placement of the banner unconvinient. I am also convinced that it should be mandatory to have a "essential cookies only" button.
I just wanted to explain what the banner is for, as the parent comment did not understand the german text.
The law doesn't say that the cookie banner has to cover the entire page. It doesn't say either that the button to reject the cookies must be hidden at the end of the form.
> It is just freaky, I don't know if it is good or bad to be associated with such an incident.
I think it's not good because of the potential to become politicly charged. Add some "cyber" and it has NatSec types reeling. There is a scenario in Ghost Fleet[1] where a vessel sailing under a Chinese flag blocks the Panama canal in a theater of war with the West. Not going to issue any spoilers but it's a brilliant (fiction) novel for hypothetical future war scenario's.
I believe the US military was worried about a German or Japanese strike on the Panama canal in WW2. And the Suez Canal was literally blocked by scuttling ships when Egypt took control in the Suez crisis.
The cause for that accident seems to have been strong wind, which apparently makes these huge ships very hard or even impossible to maneuver when they are going slow.
If true, then the "systemic issue" is only that ships are getting too big.
Hi. Skipper here (nothing of the size of the ship in question, obviously:).
Ships of ANY size are hard or impossible to maneuver when they are going slow and have a blackout. The size doesn't matter.
The control surfaces only work when they move with regards to water.
The ship that does not move is uncontrollable with rudder and it needs to use something else to help it maneuver. This something else can be a tugboat that rotates the ship by the force it can generate, or it can be thrusters. Thrusters aren't propulsion method and they are relatively small and can counter only so much wind.
I was referring to the incident in Hamburg, where there was (according to the article) no blackout, the ship had two local pilots on board and a tugboat attached.
And yet, they were unable to prevent the wind from pushing them into a moored ferry they were passing.
I think the biggest issue is complexity and resulting unreliability. On a ship that has to be in constant use for decades you want things that are simple and reliable.
"The latest design, the Azipod X, incorporates these improvements, with a view to a service interval of five years, and features bearings that can be taken apart and repaired from inside the pod while the ship is harbored normally"
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. They are working on it:)
Also an important factor on large vessel is fuel efficiency. You don't want anything sticking out unless absolutely necessary, so these would have to be meant for propulsion. But because of complex construction I can expect they are less efficient than just straight through axle and a huge propeller on it.
I expect things like this to be useful on utility vessels of small to medium size where you don't necessarily need so much efficiency but the utility comes from being able to maneuver quickly and in various conditions.
They usually isn't used as the primary means of propulsion on most bigger ships. It's also not uncommon for them to be retractable. If you need a large ship at a very specific position for a week, then you definetly need it, and that is a common use case as it allows for impressively accurate control. Heck, you could avoid moorings altogether and just keep it in place without it if you wanted to.
I have absolutely no first hand knowledge of these beasts, but some common sense here below:
The engine can most likely work both directions equally.
The propeller is optimized to work in forward direction, so it will have worse efficiency going in the other direction.
The rotation would have to be limited when going in reverse because of cavitation (and maybe other structural limitations). That again is a result of the wrong shape of the propeller (when in wrong direction).
The hull will have significantly more drag when in wrong direction.
Now, engine power is defined as whatever it can put out and if the engine works the same way in both directions then power is the same also.
So you can think this way: most likely it has the same power as going forward but it can't use it and whatever it can use will be much less efficiently translated into motion.
For ships that have turbo-electric drive trains rather than big shafts, I wonder if it would be possible to vector the propellers somewhat for better maneuverability, the same way that rockets use gimballing engines? Probably not worth the maintenance though, with sealant and salt water considerations.
This is common on cruise ships. They spend so much of their time going in and out of port the extra manoeuvrability is worth it in requiring fewer tugs.
Something that people perhaps don't appreciate is that typical large ships like this don't even have a gearbox (which would be perhaps 95% efficient).
They use large two stroke diesel engines which can be stopped and started in reverse. They use an extra valve in the engine head to admit air for starting and have valve gear which controls the direction.
Cruise ships on the other hand have electrical house loads which are almost the same as their propulsion loads. In addition to the manoeuvrability advantages this makes diesel electric drive advantageous.
It's not uncommon for ships to have thrusters that can move or rotate the ship in any directions. When doing underwater operations the ship needs to stay in place, and eg. GPS and/or triangulation from land or oil rigs is used to make sure it holds the correct position, even in quite strong winds.
I was talking about the incident in Hamburg, not at the Suez canal. I'm not sure about Suez, but I'm pretty sure you don't get to choose whether and how many tugs you need at Hamburg; the port will decide that.
The article cites a tug captain as saying that they have a very limited ability to react to big ships being pushed by strong wind. They compare it to driving a care on ice.
> Early reports speculated the vessel suffered a loss of power, but the ship’s operator, Evergreen Marine Corp, told Agence France-Presse it ran aground after being hit by a gust of wind.
Judging by the timeline on https://www.myshiptracking.com it looks like something that would be called pilot induced oscillation in aviation. Obviously speculation on my part, could be that loss of power weakened control authority over the ship and it became hard to manoeuvre.
The ship comes around the curve travelling north close to the outside (right, east, starboard) shore then overcorrect to the west shore then overcorrect more gravely to the east again and run aground.
According to the Twitter feed there is now a excavator trying to dig out the bow. It really shows off the scale as the excavator looks like a tiny toy next to the massive container ship.
...and as the article says, "Furthermore, some of the world's main waterways such as the Suez Canal and Singapore Strait also restrict the maximum dimensions of a ship that can pass through them.", which explains why the list consists of large fleets of ships all almost exactly the same size.
Much like Panamax being the largest ship size which can traverse the Panama canal, there's a corresponding Suezmax[1]. Sort of like the old story of the Space Shuttle's SRB size being dictated by old Roman road design, it's interesting how modern design is influenced by historical limitations we might not consider.
The Shuttle SRB design still was dictated at least in part by the segments being transported by rail - each individual segment could be only as heavy, wide and long as the cobined stretch of railway from the factory would allow.
It influences other rockets as well - for example the Proton:
The long thin tanks you see mounted on the first stage are not drop tanks or additional boosters, its the tanks holding the first stage fuel, with the central core holding all the oxidzer.
Thats because the core stage is limitted in width by what you can ship to Bayokonur by rail, especialy IIRC one specific rail tunnel on the route. So they ship the core stage and the additional fuel tanks on separate rail cars and then bolt them in place on the cosmodrome.
In similar manner Falcon 9 is limitted to 3.9 m of width as that is the maximum you can ship over the US highway network without special care.
If you want to go bigger, you need special aircraft and barges, or build the thing in place like it is currently being done with the SpaceX Starhip.
One of the main roads near where I live is a Roman road. It's fascinating that the new buildings being built along it have their design constrained, in some way, by a decision made 2000 years ago.
In 2016, Prokopowicz and Berg-Andreassen defined a container ship with a capacity of 10,000 to 20,000 TEU as a Very Large Container Ship (VLCS), while that with a capacity greater than 20,000 TEU as an Ultra Large Container Ship (ULCS)
They are gonna run out of larger adjectives pretty soon.
Same with IC size. Started with SSI (Small Scale Integration) then MSI (Medium Scale Integration), LSI (Large Scale Integration) and finally VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) in the early 1980ies. There was some talk of ULSI (Ultra Large Scale Integration), but thankfully this never caught on.
Edited to add this (which I did not know, but think it interesting) from the Wikipedia article:
The modern practice of ships being registered in a foreign country [ie, a flag of convenience] began in the 1920s in the United States when shipowners seeking to serve alcohol to passengers during Prohibition registered their ships in Panama. Owners soon began to perceive advantages in terms of avoiding increased regulations and rising labor costs and continued to register their ships in Panama even after Prohibition ended.
I didn’t think that “natural” conversation was an actual goal on HN. You see this particularly in the way that humour (among other things) is often downvoted and discouraged.
I upvote humour for this reason, and down vote posts that are anti-fun. Believing all writing should be dull is a characteristic of people who can't write well.
From what I recall they wanted to sell apples to the Egyptians, but the government refused. The crew ended up throwing the cargo overboard before it could perish.
I wonder what makes something significant enough to be added to this section. A quick scan of the page shows some interesting tidbits that aren't present in the opening (to me, more noteworthy - so far - than the ongoing blockage):
> The canal had an immediate and dramatic effect on world trade. Combined with the American transcontinental railroad completed six months earlier, it allowed the world to be circled in record time.
> In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, the canal was the scene of a major crossing by the Egyptian army into Israeli-occupied Sinai and a counter-crossing by the Israeli army to Egypt. Much wreckage from this conflict remains visible along the canal's edges.
Once the event is over, I suspect people will review the page and decide that this has no place in the opening section. Then it'll move down to its rightful place.
Right now it's more a matter of racing to be as up-to-date as possible, rather than actually weighing the merits of having this in the opening section.
Presumably, for as long as the ship is blocking the canal, it is important enough to be in the opening section of the article. You can imagine that if the ship is there forever, it would certainly be in the opening section.
This is a big ship. There's no nearby facility to unload or service it. Its not something you bring tools in your pickup truck to solve the problem.
If its not immediately resolvable with the ships own facilities, then its not clear it can be solved in less than a-long-time. Maybe years?
Its 200 million pounds. It holds 20,000 units. To unload it would take building a facility on-site. And maybe a rail line to carry the cargo away.
I have hopes the tug solution will solve it. But if not, then there's probably no easy solution at all. Not one that costs less than a billion dollars?
Digging is easier than construction of complex facilities. If simpler methods fail, it won't take very long to widen the channel enough that they can move the ship out.
It’s not being salvaged at the most promising way, the many tugs that surrounds are just not fully capable, the biggest of all is less than 200ton bollard pull, together with 2 less than 100ton. Surely it’s for the reason of both cost saving and only gathering available resources from around? If it get stuck for longer than few days I bet better capable tugs would appear to end the scene
The Baraka1, which is already on the scene, is described here as the most powerful tug in the Middle East. It would probably take a while to bring in more powerful tugs.
I think it can be done faster, there are people specialized in such tasks: https://www.smit.com/#view/map but yes, you are right, this is not going to be 2h fix.
In fact it’s already been 20 hours since the tweet was posted. I think the Twitter UI makes that clear enough, although reading the full thread is probably easier on Nitter https://nitter.cc/jsrailton/status/1374438210315513864
Maybe "unloading" by dragging some of the containers off the ship. Either into the sea, or on land. Yes, it would be very messy: destroy some goods, damage the ship. But it might still be cheaper than the alternatives.
If this was a controlled flight into terrain to disrupt global container shipping, then yes, it will take more than a-short-time. Because drama for consumers of narrative and benefits for certain beneficiaries.
"The pandemic also
had a deadly effect on economies: international
mobility of both people and goods screeched to
a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and
_breaking global supply chains_" - Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development, 2010.
>The canal had an immediate and dramatic effect on world trade. Combined with the American transcontinental railroad completed six months earlier, it allowed the world to be circled in record time.
Interesting! That prompted me to look up Around the World in 80 Days, and it turns it out was published 3 years later (1872), using those pieces as part of the journey.
Does anyone have some insight on how this could affect global supply chains, depending on how long the canal is blocked? It seems like it's been blocked for a day or so, and there's already a pretty big queue. I'd imagine that has to have some significant impacts already.
Global trade will probably only be significantly impacted if the canal stays blocked for more than 2 weeks, which is when it starts to become a reasonable option (time-wise) to go south instead and round the cape. A backlog of ships on both sides will start to be really significant after 4 days of blocking, with longer blockade implying ports increasingly further down the routes being impacted as well. Currently, the worst that probably is happening is that the local logistics sector (train, truck, etc.) is in re-booking hell to handle the suddenly delayed ships.
src: I work at a container-logistics software company, and we've handled and seen similar situations (sudden loss of a main class of transport for a few days).
Yep. Operationally, things like that are interesting. Global as a whole usually recovers pretty well. Might drive container and shipping rates a tad more so.
Truck and train will probably see an increase as well on the China-Europe route if it takes too long.
I don't think this will impact. There is already a lot of possibility of delays, for example ships taking detours due to bad weather systems, etc. Nobody plans success of their production based on the ship arriving on exact day.
In a chapter of "Ninety Percent of Everything", the author rides a container ship through the Suez Canal and relates what it's like, if this has piqued your interest about the shipping industry. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16044961-ninety-percent-...
Aren't they just a dozen Filipinos or Russians keeping the boat clean while the auto pilot makes a slight adjustment every few hours? I'm not sure how exciting it would be.
I haven't read the book, but I have traveled on a container ship through the Suez Canal. It's not really what I would call exciting, but it is fairly interesting. It takes less than a day to transit, and the scenery is relatively varied - you get to see urban areas, some rural farmland, beaches, and full out desert. Both in front and behind are dozens of massive container ships, just as big as the one you're on. It's quite humbling.
All this is in contrast to the rest of the time you are onboard. You are right that not very much happens. The ocean is very, very big. The vast majority of the time you can't see any land, or any other ships. If you don't have a satellite receiver of your own, there is no internet, no news, no nothing. Sometimes there is a storm. Sometimes there is a sunset. Most of the time there's nothing of note. I found it really relaxing, but it's definitely not for everyone. It's also a very expensive way to travel compared to commercial airlines or even long distance rail.
Most of the ships have unused cabins, and some shipping companies allow civilians to book them as a sort of quirky cruise experience. There is quite a lot of paperwork involved, and you need to book fairly far in advance, but it's totally doable if you have the cash and the time. When I went it cost around us$100 per night. Going from Europe to Asia takes 3-4 weeks, I think going around the world (both Suez and Panama) can take 6 weeks or more.
The company I travelled with was actually Evergreen, so I was on one of these "Ever Foo" ships people are talking about upthread. The photos on Twitter look very similar to ones I took at the time.
I booked through a specialized travel agent in the EU that has since gone bust, but if you search the web for freighter cruise or cargo ship cruise you should be able to find some other companies that can help out.
My parents traveled on container ships quite a few times (twice to NZ and OZ). Trips are typically booked through specialised travel agents (you can find them quite easily via Google). There is quite a community of people doing these trips, mainly pensioners, because you need to have time and can't be sure about timing.
For those thinking about doing it, the Asia/Africa routes from Europe are much more interesting. Going across the Atlantic or Pacific is much less interesting. Also in the modern age of container freight you don't have much time at the ports, and often the captains are reluctant to let you get off, because they are on such tight schedule and delays would quickly cost 100s of 1000s of dollars per hour (that will give you an idea about the economic impact of this blockage).
My mother actually travelled on a loose cargo freighter in the 90s. That was a completely different experience because you would often have several days or a week at port.
I did this in 2012 from Australia to South Korea - theres a bunch of specialized travel agencies you can book through. From memory it took about 10 days.
The cost was about $100 / day, but this was almost 10 years ago, so I guess it went up by now. This isn't really competitive as travel, but if you consider the experience of being on a container ship a holiday in itself, the cost was quite reasonable IMO.
There was one other passenger on board, and we could go anywhere on the ship without an escort except the engine room. I really enjoyed it, but its not for everyone as there is no communication / internet access available so you have to be the sort of person who can entertain yourself.
Also wouldn't go if you get seasick easily. Unlike say cruise ships, the crew isn't too worried about passenger comfort, and wil just plow straight through storms.
I've never travelled through Suez, but did some other canals like Panama and Kiel. Autopilot won't be used there I'm sure. Canal Authority requires having a Pilot onboard and he gives commands to the Helmsman.
Even on the open sea I've never seen that the autopilot actually steers the ship, it will only keep the heading, and sound an alert when there is time to change heading. So the watchkeeping Officer will set new heading and steer the ship in a new direction.
Tengential but I am always curious what software these huge logistics company use to manage their business. From my outsider's perspective, it seems like a best-in-class-software enabled company would have a massive advantage over the rest.
Interested to hear if anyone has insights about this
Thanks for sharing these links, it's a good peek inside the company! Idk if reality lives up to the marketing but those videos made it look like an interesting place to work at
There were some interesting profiles following the NotPetya attack on Maersk in 2017 where Maersk claimed to have 1,200 - 1,500 applications, 49,000 laptops, 6,200 servers.
Maersk are entering into block-chain "distributed ledger technology" with IBM and similar modern solutions. But one article put $300 of every $2,000 of shipping costs for administration and paperwork[0].
I think you're right, there is a massive advantage to be had, and companies are chasing that advantage. But from my (tangential logistics) background, even the biggest shipping companies have the usual range of legacy systems, heavy administration overhead, plenty of paperwork, excel-based-tools and huge integration headaches.
> 300 of every $2,000 of shipping costs for administration and paperwork
Damn that's a lot. I understand this is a capital intensive industry so I guess it's hard/impossible to get in now but it seems like if someone started a competitor from scratch and had great software as the foundation of their company, they'd make a killing
A good deal of it probably has to do with how crazy customs gets in every single port, and how to properly insure goods. (Lloyd’s of London got its start in marine insurance.)
If your paperwork is mostly driven by other actors tech probably won’t help all that much. Tech has not made significant inroads in disrupting American health insurance, for example.
Is there a reason these customs processes can't be simplified? Or is it due to some perverse capitalist reason, like TurboTax lobbying against simpler tax code?
- Every set of goods has its own regulations. Ships carry all sorts of goods.
- Every country has different customs regulations, so paperwork is not really that reusable across ports.
- Customs is a huge source of fraud. In poorly managed countries it is one of the prime vectors for bribery and corruption. So destination ports have to verify everything even if they do receive the paperwork, because there’s no trust.
Generally speaking if you want to cut customs red tape your options are some kind of free trade deal (which is not necessarily popular and never covers all types of goods), or banding together with a bunch of different countries to submit to one supranational entity like the EU. In fact we have a live example of how complicated customs arrangements can be; look at how trade from UK to EU has been disrupted by Brexit and the introduction of customs.
Here in Norway it's mostly been a lack of focus and money.
The government doesn't seem to consider the huge hidden cost to the businesses in the country this represents, and the businesses haven't been stellar at highlighting it, which I guess is because they mostly just push that cost onto the consumers.
One big factor is simply that a customs authority can dictate whatever process it wishes for ships who want to load/unload cargo there.
It's also not just customs, there are a ton of ancillary processes related to berthing - things like harbor fees, environmental documentation etc.
I know of at least one case where, as recently as ~2015, a shipping company had to keep around old machines with IE8 because that was the only way to interact with authorities at a given port.
Everyone has to do paperwork, but is that 'admin overhead' it an essential part of safety culture? I'm struggling to see where the overhead is that significant.
It is a lot more obvious in other fields -- medicine and highly regulated/litigious professions.
it does not compile, I guess it's just like those ERP Systems - you don't need shitton of domain knowledge, because you need fuckton of domain knowledge and during development you'll learn even more and have to refactor a lot of stuff frequently for edge cases.
This is obviously something that affects how competitive you can be. As an example, our software allowed a customer to go from 5-6 hours of work in their previous application, to less than 10 minutes in ours for a typical workload.
However, a big remaining issue is that there's a lot of local laws and procedures around which are not exposed in a computer-friendly way. If they are computerized they're often old systems with serious limitations.
For example, import declarations in Denmark is limited to only 99 goods items, so consolidation of goods items is almost required, especially in e-commerce settings, which again makes it more difficult if things are re-exported (customer didn't want that jacket say).
This can't be fixed on the commercial side, it requires work by the government agencies.
There was a very interesting Omega Tau podcast about this very subject a while back. They go into a lot of detail about the optimization problem and how they address it.
In 2016 John Willis was with Docker and he gave a talk where he casually recommended a book called The Box [1] about how shipping containers have shaped the modern world. When I was reading it there was a part where they talk about how the logistics optimization problem caused the major shippers to be some of the earliest adopters of computers. Interesting book.
That book has a lot of interesting lessons to draw from [1] and that was even before they became a ubiquitous analogy for various things related to software containers. Sun's Jonathan Schwartz was talking up this book in the late 90s.
Three I picked out were:
- Existing infrastructure matters (e.g. SuezMax)
- Standards matter (container size and handling needed to be standardized)
- Process matters (e.g. containers needed changes to the way loading and unloading was done, and hence changes to labor agreements, at major ports)
The podcast "Containers" also covers how shipping containers have shaped the mordern world — well worth a listen, though I don't recall it mentioning this aspect of their logistics.
Also tangential: I'm not sure about the real-life software itself, but IIRC, the example app in Eric Evan's Domain Driven Design is a shipping logistics app!
Ha, I happened to see it leave Boston August of last year and snapped a photo of it because it was jaw dropping big (and I’m not a boat person!) the Evergreen had 4 tugboats guiding it. Yeah that thing isn’t moving without professional help. https://photos.app.goo.gl/6Ywgot5wmK6HDNoV6
Edit: so this is the “ever living” that’s 335 meters long. The ever given is 400 meters long
Evergreen is one of the shipping companies from Taiwan. Incidentally, one of my favorite airlines EVA Air is their spinoff airline, based in Taipei (and far better than the flag carrier China Airlines)
The ship is Japanese operated by Taiwanese company, according to NHK News this evening in Japan. The ship ran aground due to bad weather conditions, poor visibility due to sand storm.
Looking at GP's foto again I believe the name of the ship they photographed ends with a 'G'. But I also realized my mistake with mixing up the ship's name with the company name.
There you have it, shows you how much I know about boats, although the more I’ve been reading this thread the more interested I am about learning more about the industry.
As of 2330 (GMT+2) M/V EVER GIVEN, no. 5 in the 23rd of March NB convoy remains #grounded in the #SuezCanal.
Vessel no. 6, 7 & 8 will be assisted by tugs back to Suez anchorage area, clearing space for M/V EVER GIVEN to be towed out the same way as she entered once re-floated. https://t.co/ltXEyRZtqX
Can anybody speak as to why they are able to get the ship no longer stuck horizontal, but still need to drag it out the way it came? Why can't it just go forward on the path it was headed on?
As I shared in another comment according to NHK News in Japan, poor visibility due to sand storm was the cause. It is a Japanese ship operated by Taiwanese company.
Can you find that tweet again? I'm scouring every link I can find and I seem to have lost it.
In particular, there was one where someone said another ship behind them _also_ lost power/control around the same time and almost rear-ended them. I would really love to find that tweet again.
Some back-of-the-napkin calculations: The ship's got over 20k containers, so less than $10 per container. Shipping a container from Asia to Europe costs thousands of dollars, so passing through the canal is less than 1% of the cost. Sounds fair to me?
The ship in the video is not a container ship but a taker or bulk cargo ship, so you cannot calculate this way. But I am sure it is not much if you divide the toll fee by total shipping cost or even the value of the cargo. It was just the total sum that I found impressive.
Oh, good point - I mixed it up with Ever Given. Agreed $200k is a lot, but probably totally insignificant compared to the major costs (fuel, wear & tear).
Maintaining the channel seems to be a lot of work... like when ships crash into the bank and block it.
1. How easy would it be to pay a container ship’s captain to do that ?
2. Can you then bet on short term commodity futures to benefits from the event significantly?
3. Do you think this is what’s happening ?
Certainly in cases of collision the owners of the vessel retain liability even with a Suez Canal pilot on board[0]. It's possible that they then have a claim against the canal company for provision of negligent piloting, but I don't know that.
It was caused by a power blackout meaning no-one was in control of the ship. It’s possible someone pulled a breaker or something but I don’t know how easy that would be to do in a way that would not look like sabotage.
Only familiar with much, much smaller boats - but that's not unusual for station-keeping (or anchoring, but I expect a moon-shaped track at anchor). To be super clear, I'm extrapolating from 30ft boats, I could be wildly wrong in any of this.
In a nutshell you don't stay still, you drift around with wind and currents (and breeze-block shaped ships have a lot of windage!). So you drift off station, motor back, rinse repeat. ('Station' is usually a box you're bound to rather than a point you try to hit, for exactly this reason)
Anchor isn't much different - a cargo ship in an anchorage isn't a static fixture, it's realistically the world's largest windsock.
Compare another ship waiting in the same area - https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000 Hit the "Track" button on the sidebar (under the photo of the ship), and you'll see a similar history. Theirs is tighter, but that could simply be a product of it getting crowded. I'd expect EG's arrival to be more planned, less chaotic - arrive, assemble the convoy, join the queue and go.
I am hopeful, but for some unfounded reason I'm giving it equal chances of suffering from structural failure when that happens and dumping shipping containers into the canal.
I was able to find news reports of the canal being dredged in 2015 but nothing since then.
edit: I see that they've already had one high tide opportunity which did not dislodge the vessel. From your tide chart link, I can see that the tides get progressively deeper until the end of the month, but that is a long time to be stuck there.
Seeing how it is positioned, the worst case is that they will not be able to move it and they will have to remove some of the load. This might take a day or three depending on how difficult it is going to get a crane and a ship positioned to take the load off.
There's no reason to do this. Shipping cost is disproportionately affected by loading/unloading, and every other type of transport is more expensive (per mile travelled). So what you actually want to do is take the ship as close as possible to the goods' final destination, and minimize trucking and rail and so on.
I'm not sure exactly where the "economic center" of Europe is but maps of gridded GDP [0] or nightlights [1] suggests Rotterdam is a pretty good choice.
I think the issue here is how well connected such a port would be. From Rotterdam you can go all the way to Germany through a river. Not sure you could do the same from a port in the Mediterranean, as the terrain tends to be mountainous there.
The Danube river flows into the Black Sea from Germany, though I have no idea if it's navigable for ships of the same size as would go to Rotterdam. Nothing from the Mediterranean.
The BBC article [0] is saying that apparently an older parallel channel has been reopened. Does anyone know where this might be? I can't find a parallel channel that would bypass this blockage...
Indeed, the ship is stranded between the Small Bitter Lake and the Suez Port so there seems to be no bypass available. (The New Suez Canal doesn't cover this particular range.)
So, fellow Europeans, prepare for a longer delivery time for most of your items starting from, I don't know, 10 days from now? What's the buffer size for most of the products in, say, an Amazon Fulfillment facility?
Also, I expect this kind of stop will cause the ships to be lining up in the unloading facilities in e.g. Rotterdam, so there will be secondary obstructions beyond the time the canal is blocked.
I read something where this is causing something like 18 million dollars of debt a minute. So roughly 750 billion a month? Let's round it to a trillion dollars a month with interest.
they often do at least the smaller vessels[1]. should be able to find interesting exposed endpoints on shodan. Pentest-Partners did a post[2] on interfering with load management software in container ships.
Sorta makes me wonder why another ship, larger than a tugboat, couldn't hitch it with a tow rope (whatever the marine term) and give it a jerk. I get that ships aren't normally expected to do that, but you know, probably need larger tugboats for gigantic ships.
Amusingly enough, the tugs not uncommonly have more thrust.
Large ships are _heavily_ optimized for the common case, which is sailing at about 13.5 knots. They take a very long time to get up to speed because their propulsion is sized to be just enough to overcome resistance at their typical cruising speed.
Consequently, it would be difficult to get another ship up to any sort of speed in a short enough distance. Even if you could, the the momentum is absurdly high so it's much more likely that any sort of chain would snap, or the attachment point would break than that the aground ship would actually move.
(The aground ship has a deadweight of approx 200,000 tonnes)
Expanding on your comment, it's analogous to torque vs speed in cars. You wouldn't use a Ferrari to tow just because it has a high top speed and lots of top-end power. You'd use something with high torque down low and good gearing.
Similarly, tugs use different propeller setups (e.g. ducted props for extra power, or vectored systems such as azimuth thrusters or cyclorotors for extra manuverability), which just cause extra drag if all you're doing is cruising at a fixed speed throughout oceans.
A big container ship trying to tow something is not unlike having a high-speed racecar spin its wheels. It's not designed to put that torque down at low speed and lift a big trailing mass.
Based on the photos, the most useful vector a tug (of any strength) might take is not available. Yanking the ship backwards, off the bank, would work nicely but pulling its bow 35 degrees through the bank is pretty rough.
They need to pull the aft sideways while keeping the bow steady, that way it would angle slightly and then pull back. Requires no space behind the ship, and is likely the reverse of what happened...
Apparently the limiting question is how much force can be exerted on the ship and from what locations without damaging it (or, damaging it too much).
That's why recovery specialists are flying in. They know how to do that kind of engineering calculation, as well as all the weight & balance calcs needed to e.g. move ballast in unusual ways, etc.
What does this blockage of the canal mean for investments in oil cargo ships? Will the rates for oil cargo ships increase because they will sail around Africa instead?
It's cutting off other ships because when it lost power it drifted sideways and blocked the canal. It's now stuck in both embankments and the only vessels getting past are very flat submarines.
GP is referencing a comment on Instagram [0] that states that it cut off another ship enter the channel /before/ it grounded:
> @tjcsalisbury Yepp! And I believe they cut us off this morning entering the canal and then this happened and right after they ran aground the ship behind us lost power and almost hit us so it’s been a fun day lol but now we are just anchored here hopefully it won’t be to long but from the looks of it that ship is super stuck they had a bunch of tugs trying to pull and push it earlier but it was going nowhere there is a little excavator trying to dig out the bow
I don't think that happened but if I did I'd be thinking financial market manipulation for private gain long before intelligence agency shenanigans by states.
I'd imagine a long blockage has an effect on oil prices, as most oil coming from the Gulf States to Europe (and America's west coasts?) would normally travel through there.
How is it that something like this just happened now? The canal has been open for decades, is it that they probably loaded one extra container on a ship like this and that was the straw that broke the camel's back?
I don't think I'd ever considered prior to now how much more economic it would be to release "The one nuclear bomb [TerroristOrganisation] can afford to muster" in a shipping choke-point, rather than a city.
For the Suez Canal a huge bomb is just going to make it bigger and easier to navigate in one spot.
Blow up the locks for the Panama Canal and you have some seriously inconvenienced shipping companies.
But even in both cases the result is that they have to take the long way around. It makes the shipping slower and more expensive, but it was a tiny fraction of your costs to begin with so most companies survive just fine.
For the Suez Canal a huge bomb is just going to make it bigger and easier to navigate in one spot.
A huge bomb to one side of the canal would displace rock and mud in to the channel and make it shallower. That would be enough to close it to large ships until it could be dredged again.
Although, if terrorists really wanted to wreak havoc in the canal they could scuttle a large ship while it's sailing in it. That would necessitate dismantling and removing the entire thing.
> In October 1967, the officers and crews of all fourteen ships met on the Melampus to found the "Great Bitter Lake Association" which provided mutual support. Crew members continued to regularly meet on board their ships, organized social events, founded a yachting club and held the "Bitter Lake Olympic Games" to complement the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Life boat races were arranged and soccer games were played on the largest ship, the MS Port Invercargill, while church services were held on the West German motorship Nordwind and movies were shown on the Bulgarian freighter Vasil Levsky.[2] The Swedish Killara had a pool.[3]
> In time, it was possible to reduce the number of crew members on board the ships, and in 1969 the ships were gathered into several groups to further reduce the number of crew necessary for their upkeep. Those crew that were left to maintain the vessels were rotated every three months. In 1972, the last crew members of the German ships were finally sent home, with the maintenance of the ships left to a Norwegian company.
I remember back in the early 90s attending a CEBIT trade show (at the time perhaps the largest computing show in the world -- the show floors covered acres) and being astonished to see that the Bundespost delivered mail, including the usual trade show flyers, to each display booth. Yes, uniformed postal workers wheeling the usual delivery carts up and down the aisles.
I think we forget how important transporting physical media (usually just paper) was back in those days. The penny post used to deliver twice a day in cities. Now I check my mail every 4-6 weeks and there's rarely anything important in it.
I suspect it's not the use of the bomb that is the biggest concern.
I would think someone with a bomb on some kind of bulk Hazmat carrier and the threat of blowing it up would shut down traffic for a lot longer. Nobody is going to want to get close to do anything about it.
LNG or Oil are the two I can think of, but there's probably a lot of other bulk Hazmat carriers.
The major canals aren't around big population centers so blowing something like that up wouldn't make a huge impact. Also due to the structure of a canal (limited blast containment; most of a ship is above the surface) the actual damage would be limited.
No they’d be geniuses because they would cause economic losses to powerful people a lot like how the good Friday agreement came about quite quickly after the IRA broke every office window in the finicial district of London with a truckload of fertiliser. No-one was killed and glaziers rates went up 10 times for a few months. It caused a big disruption to the financial district but most ordinary people weren’t that bothered by it. Actual terrorism, chopping peoples heads off or letting off bombs in the metro doesn’t acheive anything, it just pisses ordinary people off and makes them want the government to bomb you right back.
You’re right, I misremembered. I’m not saying that the IRA weren’t bad, they killed more people than 9/11, but they learnt that killing random people was bad for PR and adapted thier tactics to economic targets in the 90’s. I’m from London and I lived through the IRA bombing campaign of the 90’s and the various ISIS attacks of the 2000’s. The IRA made me annoyed, angry maybe but not terrorised, they phoned in warnings and thier attacks were mostly inconvenient. The 7/7 suicide bombers were a completely different intent, they were out to kill as many random people as possible, the IRA weren’t by that stage.
But who cares if it terrorises? I mean, I care if my tube train seems scarier than last week but I'm irrelevant. If the goal of Islamic terrorists is to have America or Britain change its foreign policy towards Islamic countries, I think that Islamic terrorism has achieved the opposite of that. If the IRA's goal was to change the position of the British government from 'we don't negotiate with terrorists' then the bombs that had a big impact on the financial centre of the UK had the effect of changing that policy. I'm arguing that terrorising normal people only has the effect of turning normal people against your cause, much like the Blitz which was designed to terrorise the population didn't make the British want to surrender to Germany, and when Britain did gain the upper hand, the British public were happy for the British state to visit worse destruction on German cities.
The main effect of terror is destabilisation, which is also what breeds terrorism. Islamic terrorism in Europe turns people against their muslim demographics, and most importantly promotes populism and right-wing politics in general. Those are all pretty auto-destructive things. Some normal reactions to terrorism is to alienate some demographics or to exact revenge on some countries, both of which just create more recruits for the terrorist. It makes sense if you don't take that universal-islamic-state narrative too seriously.
Dozen or so ships would be enough to blockade both Suez and Panama... That would cause substantial damage to global shipping industry... Not even that expensive. Hundred or two hundred million would do...
Panama is not that busy. A much better target would be the kiel canal (Nord- Ostsee Kanal in German), which is the busiest waterway in the world 25000 ships yearly vs 19000 ships for the Suez vs 12000 for Panama.
There could be real values in faking a technical outage and then getting stuck.
I don't claim to understand the global shipping dynamics, but I do see that there's lots of frustrated ship crews with nowhere to go, because of the pandemic.
Airplanes have ADS-B, which is quite similar to the maritime AIS location broadcasting. The only significant difference is that satellite AIS coverage is high and ships don't go fast, so having no signal for a few hours is not as big a problem for ships.
ADS-B satellite coverage is currently provided by (at least) the iridium constellation, but that only came into effect in 2016.
It would be ironic if this spiralled into a global crisis, that spiraled into something else, until, finally, we're all cave people again. I think conspiracy theorists are having a field day.
I mean, technically you could detour around South America it just probably isn't recommended.
I wonder if, if you're a container ship leaving China today, headed for Europe, if it makes sense to head for Panama instead, purely on the metric of time, or if you're still better off either rounding Africa or just waiting for the Suez to clear.
(I assume from a fuel/logistics point it is cheapest just to wait.)
? This is the first time I hear about Nigerian pirates. The problem several years ago were Somalian pirates, which incidentally are next to the Suez route.
My bad. I didn't mean scuttle and leave there. I meant take apart with welding torches. Not sure what the proper term is for that. However they got it moving so we are all good to go.
Any fans of What We Do in the Shadows here? Getting strong vibes from the second season when Colin Robinson parks his car across the entrance to the Lincoln tunnel.
From the Twitter thread: "For the confused: MV EVER GIVEN's operator is Evergreen Marine (https://evergreen-line.com) and Ever___ is a naming convention for some vessels."
Hehehe okay, I'll take the downvote and repeated comments :) Serves me right for not thinking twice! Genuinely didn't occur to me that it might be something other than a typo that went rogue. Ho hum.
This system seems messed up and is ready for disruption. Lets replace gigantic container ships with a worldwide flock of drones following the sun 24/7.
I guess it won't be too hard to unjam it, but imagine how the world would change if it does get stuck, everyone would now have to go around Africa, probably boosting a few African economies.
A bit like how a tiny bat (citation needed?) changed the course of the world for at least a year.
The pangolin seems to be the bridge species. Bats have tons of coronaviruses, but none of them usually infect humans. The question is which animal bridged the gap.
Kinda like how the Mink was going to become the bridge-species in Denmark (humans infected Minks with COVID19... and then the mink was probably going to infect another species after that).
Some lucky places can open ports for the giant ships to stop and refuel/resupply, that brings a lot of income.
Though maybe I've got the scale wrong, and these ships can just buy more fuel and more food at their departure ports and go around Africa without stopping...
They just go around. It’s not catastrophic just adds cost and time. No refueling or ports required for these mega carriers. We’d go around the cape sometimes just because of loads, some aren’t allowed through, or because fees were too high for the value of cargo. Depending on the size of the carrier it can add 20 days or so to the voyage.
At the time it was not yet know that the virus is lethal, that’s all that was reported.
Everything was also under control in China, as was later confirmed. Unfortunately by the time the virus was detected in China, it was already spread throughout Europe, since at least November 2019.
I really didn’t expect this sort of rejection of science and facts on HN.
IIRC even when Wuhan had been under total lockdown China was still upset that other countries called for flight bans from China. How is that responsible behavior?
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https://www.google.com/search?q=evergreen+ever+given&source=...
In this picture of the ship stuck in the Suez, the red/black line appears to tilt noticeably upwards towards the bow:
https://twitter.com/marceldirsus/status/1374480496789393412
If this isn't some sort of optical illusion, the bow of the ship appears runaground by quite a bit.