The Ever Given’s interaction with the Suez Canal

by philg

“The bank effect and the big boat blocking the Suez” (FT, mostly paywalled, but the link might work because I’ve included a Facebook ID) is interesting and reveals some similarities to Queen Elizabeth 2‘s grounding off Cape Cod, in which the ship dug a 9′ hole in the water by traveling at 25 knots. Some excerpts:

The canal has been getting wider and deeper over time…

But it is not so wide/deep that displaced water can be ignored.

Is it time to read Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal? (Remember that the Pharaohs who purportedly oppressed the Jews built this first!)

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4 thoughts on “The Ever Given’s interaction with the Suez Canal”

  1. I read that the economic damage was $400 million per hour while the ship was stuck, and it will take several more days at least to ensure safe passage of the bottlenecked vessels. A few days ago I said to a friend of yours that anything over $10 billion was going to be sufficient cause to re-dredge the canal. I based that on the aerial photography where the silt that has accumulated near the Ever Given is clearly visible through the water.

    I speculated that China will offer to re-dredge the entire length of the canal, initially focusing on the “problem areas” for a price that an outfit like Bechtel simply cannot match.

    • Bechtel did a little project in Western Australia back in 2017:

      https://www.bechtel.com/blog/sustainability/november-2017/safe-dredging-circular-economy/

      “To dredge the plant’s 10-mile (16-kilometer) channel, Bechtel participated in a program that used sensors to continually monitor water quality between work zones and sensitive areas such as coral reefs and seagrass communities. Meanwhile, engineers used real-time models of winds, tides, currents, and other weather information to predict how sediment kicked up by the work would disperse.”

      From everything I’ve read, American help was not asked for in this instance and my guess is that all the future work on the Suez is going to be done by the Chinese.

  2. What’s truly surprising about the Suez, to me at least, is that even with the “side channel” and its extra capacity, it’s obviously not wide or deep enough, nor can it withstand any significant mishap. To push so much of the world’s commerce through such a tiny artery reminds me of routing a third of world’s internet traffic through a Hayes Smartmodem 9600. The Egyptians guard their stuff pretty closely, though.

    https://www.ebay.com/itm/151594263692

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