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Original title: Container ship stranded in the Suez Canal. Currently, the focus is on whether unloading is necessary to reduce the load. Source: Sina Finance
The 400-meter-long container ship “Longci”, carrying nearly $ 1 billion in cargo, ran aground in the Suez Canal on Tuesday. The rescue time is currently expected to be at least one week. ships that are blocked, the delay time will not be delayed. This transportation hub has been blocked, affecting roughly 10% of world trade and large imports that are vital to European supply chains and industry. Many freighters have decided to divert to the southern tip of Africa.
If the excavation work cannot make the “Long Give” shallow or progress is too slow, unloading thousands of 40-foot containers and fuel to reduce the load may be one of the rescue jobs that need to be done.
Two options
The main plan is to install a large crane or use a powerful helicopter. Each container can carry up to 22 tons of cargo.
However, these two programs are not easy to implement. Helicopter lifting is expensive and you have to decide who pays for it. Crane barges also have difficulties. There are relatively few crane barges that can lift containers from such a high ship, and the task is not uncomfortable.
“It takes a lot of time and effort,” said Joseph Farrell III, director of business development for salvage services company Resolve Marine. He declined to comment specifically on the “Long Grant.” “It can also be very dangerous, because it requires people to climb into the container, put a rope in each container, and then lift it up.”
There has also been precedent for a smooth escape through excavation. In 2016, a similar large container ship got stuck in the Elbe river in Germany. SMIT carried out intensive dredging around the freighter for a week and finally succeeded. This time, the company was also hired to help get the “Long Grant” off the ground.
However, if in the end it is necessary to use a helicopter, the cost will be very high. Farrell said that without mentioning the need for up-front fees, the hourly charge can be as high as $ 20,000.
Nick Sloane, responsible for dredging the 2012 Costa Concordia stranding accident, said this task can only be accomplished with an overhead crane on a helicopter, which can lift 25,000 pounds (about 12.5 tons) of cargo.
Columbia Helicopters Inc., a company that offers heavy commercial helicopters. Keith Saylor, director of business operations for, said finding the right helicopter is a task in itself.
Saylor said the few suitable helicopters are privately owned, most of which are in the United States, nearly 7,000 miles away.
He said in a telephone interview in Phoenix, Arizona: “If you can’t find a helicopter near the Suez Canal, you have to bring it in from a distance.”
The cost of helicopter transportation alone is estimated to be $ 1.7 million. Finding the right driver is not easy. Saylor said that the number of pilots trained in these types of missions cannot exceed 100 in the world.
Saylor stated that it takes 5 minutes to unload a container and 144 containers can be unloaded in 12 hours. The “Long Give” can carry around 20,000 containers.
As for the barge crane solution, since the Long Grant is one of the largest ships of its kind in the world, an extraordinarily tall barge crane is needed to complete this job; there are very few cranes of this type in the world.
