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.
