Could you build a temporary barrier around the ship and the section of the canal, bring in some massive pumps, and temporarily raise the water level around the ship?
In the middle parts of the ship it is probably not grounded, so you might have ropes below the hull with large inflatable balloons on both sides below water level, to give the ship extra lift. Then on a high tide, with oil & water removed, maybe some dredging on the sides where it needs to rotate to, and.. go!
Lets say they cabled a Goodyear blimp to each side of the ship One Goodyear blimp is about 5,000 m^3 and a meter^3 of seawater is about a ton, so that gives us 10,000 tones of lifting force!.
The ship weighs 220,000 so it will be riding about 4.5% higher in the water. The main channel is very narrow. Its bow is buried about 20m deep and 100m into the shallow bottom outside of the channel. They are not going to lift it out.
Just so everyone is clear: The company that handled the salvaging of the Costa Concordia is the company that is handling the salvaging of this ship. Same exact people! You can bet that they are going to be doing the best thing that can be done.
Using the same Concordia techniques maybe SMIT Salvage would float Evergreen to 'loosen' it a bit out of sand, loosen further by dredging, and then when high tide comes [1], Evergreen would be able to turn around with help of tug boats.
i'd swear someone changed my comment but no it was me i'm an idiot. it's not even the other larry! sergey brin. sergey brin flies in with a zeppelin & floats the boat.
I've had the exact same idea but the canal bank is very shallow.. so you would have to build around the whole ship (as you said). This also seems like a major undertaking.
I am excited to see how they will solve the problem though!
If the bank is very shallow and mostly sand, maybe instead of building a damn all around the ship it would be easier to just dredge a new passage that goes around the stuck ship. After all the real problem isn't that the ship is run aground, it's that the canal is blocked for everyone else.
If would be a very long diversion. The turning radius of large ships is, well, astronomical, we're talking miles.
The canal itself is MASSIVE - 79ft deep and 700ft wide - and if you're turning you'd need to be wider still. We're talking about removing absolutely massive amounts of material.
> The turning radius of large ships is, well, astronomical, we're talking miles.
That's when under speed. If these ships don't have the unidirectional port engines like cruise ships do for maneuvering in tight spots (and they may not, I don't know), in this situation they would likely use tugboats for turning. That's what they're for.
That doesn't necessarily make a diversion feasible, but I don't think whether it's feasible or not rests on whether these ships can turn. That's really not the problem as I see it.
If with a zero turn radius, these ships are in excess of 1000ft long...you need a lot of clearance and a large radius just because of the physical dimensions (and so you know, we don't get a second ship wedged sideways in the canal.
We're talking about digging a diversionary channel. Making either end of that where it connects to the current channel wider to accommodate turning is trivial in comparison.
Probably very complicated since you couldn't have people in close. What if, as is not unlikely, part of the bank suddenly crumbles and the boat shifts?
Also, I doubt the sand goes down very deep...this is a costal area, not rolling dunes. You're going to hit rock quickly.
Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia page for this ship says it does have two 2500kW bow thrusters. I imagine if they were worth much in this situation we wouldn’t be talking about them, though.
which is not going to do much here. It seems the trouble with a lot of solutions - the tugs can probably tug with a force of something like 600 tons combined but the ship weights 220,000 tons which is like putting a force of 5kg on a 2 ton car which is stuck. Probably not going to budge it.
Really you want something which will shove it with a force maybe 10% of the weight, say 20,000 tons but there don't seem to be many of those lying around.
I wondered if they tied a cable from the ship to one of the other large ships nearby and fired up the main engines if that could do something?
> The turning radius of large ships is, well, astronomical, we're talking miles.
But do the ships actually have to turn? As long as they are floating instead of stuck in the sand, can't they be dragged sideways, either by tugboats or by stationary winches on land?
Of course, the ships would have to stop first, which would take miles of slowing down, and it would probably still be faster to fully dig the stuck ship out of the sand than to dig a diversion channel.
Well, they did it before, and without the help of the massive diggers we have currently, so it can’t be that hard, relatively speaking.
Besides, my newspaper said that the economic losses of the stuckness amount to like 400M per hour. That is a looot of money you can throw at a problem.
Actually with a well placed nuclear warhead placed directly under the ship, it could be thrown out of the canal and into the nearby desert clearing the canal route /s
Those were what, 300kiloton’s ish? So if we go to 1+ megaton we’d be good. Seems reasonable if we go up to 3-4 megatons, maybe we’d even end up with a big enough crater one of these ships could pull a three point turn next time?
A better way would be to explode one medium sized nuke under the ship, wait a few seconds then explode another and then start exploding nukes behind it until it's going fast enough.
Project Orion did contemplate a 400m diameter ship weighing 8 million tons....
>Proposed uses for nuclear explosives under Project Plowshare included widening the Panama Canal, constructing a new sea-level waterway through Nicaragua nicknamed the Pan-Atomic Canal, cutting paths through mountainous areas for highways, and connecting inland river systems.
Dredge a new passage? These ships do not turn on a dime, it would have to be started way before this blockage, and end way after the blockage so that the entry and exit are shallow enough of an angle for even the largest ships to handle with easy.
You're basically asking why can't they just make a whole new canal in less than a week?
I'd think that rather than dredge enough sand/dirt to create a completely new channel, it'd be easier to dredge out enough next to the ship to free it. They should only need to dredge out the bow and stern, the middle of the ship is already in deeper water.
No, just change the density. The oil industry uses cesium formate. It's relatively non-toxic. The brine can have density of 19.2 pounds per gallon. (2.3 grams/mL)
I honestly think a lot of thinking works that way, where we'll let tomorrow me worry about it. To be fair, a lot of the time it makes sense. The problems a solution creates are things we need to accept when alternative is worse (think global warming vs starvation circa 1770).
The pressure on the hypothetical levee wouldn't be much since we're only talking about a couple dozen feet of water depth. (Yes, some jerk is going to come along and calculate out that that's an impressive amount of total force and act like that's a big deal but it's not really that impressive when you've got a huge amount of material to spread it out over).
Digging out around the ship is going to be much less work because of the amount of material you'll need to move and how far you'll need to move it.
A dual approach might be to dig around, but just place the dirt in preparation for a temporary levy scenario.
So much cash burned per hour, a fallback wouldn't hurt, and secondary backhoes could be used, so the primaries don't slow down in their primary task, dredging.
Of course, I bet someone is, even now, trying to reduce costs, not caring that even an hour or two will wipe out all savings.
Edit: Something like this https://www.hydrologicalsolutions.com/aqua-barrier-cofferdam...