Anyone who has paid even a little bit of attention to the news over the past couple of weeks will recognize the name of the ship that blocked the Suez Canal. This ain’t no lil dinghy, folks - in fact, the numbers on this one are difficult for me to wrap my head around.
The Ever Given is 400m-long (1,312ft) and weighs 200,000 tonnes…
Man…where was this thing when those guys had that problem with that shark that one time?
The economic impact is kinda silly, too. Some 10-12% of global trade, billions and billions of dollars lost or delayed…all on account of one boat (albeit a big’un) getting bunged diagonal-wise across one canal. Incredible.
Anyhow, I was talking to a buddy about it and it put me in mind of 11foot8 (see also: _inGraph of the Week - 11 Foot 8 (Part 1) __inGraph of the Week - 11 , _ _Foot 8 (Part 2) inGraph of the Week - 11 Foot 8 (The Final Chapter?), __). In particular, he came at me with _“Why don’t they just…” - i.e., Why’s it so narrow in the first place?/Why didn’t they just take a ton o dynamite and blast that thing out to a full channel? (Side note: I reckon Boxcar Willie was ahead of his time.)
So I did a bit of research (meaning: I googled “suez” and clicked on the Wikipedia link), and:
The canal officially opened on 17 November 1869.
Imagine telling your crew 150 years ago “some day there may be 400m-long ship coming through here, we have to plan accordingly”, keeping in mind what the state-of-the-art at the time looked like.
How wide should it be? Should we make provisions for a ship that’s, say, a kilometer long? Two kilometers? Should we dig out half of Egypt “just in case”? Also, they actually did recently widen it - or at least, part of it; roughly 1/6 of the total length of the canal, at a cost of $9bn (and - astonishingly - it only took about a year).
Now, I’m no canal-builder (canalist? canaleer?), but the kinds of things I wonder about are actually external to the widening itself. Things like…what do you do about the bridges? Are there buildings alongside the canal that would need to be moved/demoed? Whose “problem” are those things?
…and how does widening it impact the depth/flow of the water? Does that mean you also have to make it deeper? Widen the ingress point? Install pumps or something?
All questions to ask your local Canal Guy; I wanna know, but I’ve spent entirely too much time down the wiki-hole as it is.