It never costed $56 billion. It's just $56 billion worth of goods held up for a few days. A bit like a bitcoin payment.

Some of those goods are cattle. Imagine being blocked in the middle of the desert on a steel ship for days.

It takes almost a day to transit the canal, so presumably they have some way of dealing with the heat.

How many cattle can fit in a TEU?

Are we dealing with spherical cows here?

Cattle (and sheep, of which there are at least 130.000 stuck at the moment, see https://www.voanews.com/middle-east/stranded-suez-canal-ship...) aren't squeezed in containers but rather shipped on specialized ships (which in turn often are sometimes barely retrofitted other ships, such as car ferries, see https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/spanien-rinder-irrfahrt...).

Not to mention the value of teaching a lesson about single points of failure

What lesson is that?

Would it have been cheaper to build and maintain two canals? And it's not the end of the world if ships have to go the long way.

Interestingly, there's at least a possibility for a Nicaragua Canal as a redundancy for the Panama Canal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_Canal

Doubt there's any alternate paths for a Suez Canal.

Wow, in a list of astoundingly bad ideas, cutting a path for large container ships through a pristine freshwater lake will probably rank at the top.

I love pristine lakes too but we should look at the cost/benefit before deciding.

A pristine lake doesn’t have infinite value, right?

It depends on who's point of view we're evaluating it from. I haven't looked, but suppose there is an endangered species which call the lake home, perhaps that is the only place they inhabit. Putting them one oil spill away from existence.

So, what's the going rate for pristine lakes nowadays?

It’s actually really high since you’d be ruining the enjoyment of the lake for all future generations plus the fact that you can’t predict how much enjoyment they would get from it.

But if there were enough benefits it could still be worth it. Brining 50k people out of poverty for example? Reducing trucking pollution by a large amount.

Best I can do is about tree fiddy.

you could cut across the egypt/israel border from the gulf of aqaba.

It would be something like ten times the length of Suez, and I think there are mountains in the middle, but it would be pretty cool! :)

It's been proposed before! https://www.jpost.com/opinion/an-israeli-suez-canal-393225

It would be less than 3x the length, not 10x. The mountains are a problem; it could go around but would still need to dig a lot. And it doesn't seem feasible politically right now, but it could be a really cool project.

(If it was built, then a side-canal to irrigate the Dead Sea would be a relatively cheap value-add.)

The Norwegians are already planning a tunnel for boats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stad_Ship_Tunnel

"In March 2021, the Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications gave approval for preparations to begin, with the Norwegian Coastal Administration expecting construction to begin in 2022."

Norway, where else! They seem to have an entirely different relation to tunneling than the rest of humanity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drammen_Spiral

And there are canal tunnels already - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_tunnel

A large portion of the channel has been upgraded into two lanes in the last few years.

Well maybe....make the Suez Canal wider? Like, double the width, so if this happens again ships can pass?

Or would it just lead to ships being made that can accomodate the entire width of the super-wide canal? :P

Look at Panama Canal: its dimensions have defined container ships since...well...since it was built (see "Panamax"). When a new and improved set of locks was built, New Panamax ships (i.e. "juust large enough to fit the new maxima") were launched.

Well I suppose that has a very simple solution - make the canal wider so that even if a ship runs into a side others can pass, but leave the entry points on both ends the same width.

Maybe more like having a stockpile of essential parts may be beneficial if something like this or Corona happens.

If you're relying on intercontinental cargo ships then you probably already know you need to have a buffer, whether you actually have one or not.

Also, for some businesses it may just not make sense as the cost of stockpiling is more than the occasional loss of productivity.

Name one thing that you, as a consumer, have not been able to get a consequence of the Seuz being blocked?

Just to give you one example, there is a months worth of raw material for FFP2 masks on there somewhere.

Why are you restricting this to consumers? There are plenty of businesses getting hurt by this.

With the delay, it might still come to us.

Gas at $2.79/gal

I guarantee everyone will forget about it soon. Same as with pandemic, in 10 years, if the new virus strikes, governments around the world we clueless.

> Same as with pandemic, in 10 years, if the new virus strikes, governments around the world we clueless.

SARS in 2004 primed Hong Kong for a robust virus response in 2020. As much as the HK government gets wrong, they've done a really good job so far with SARS-CoV2. We have 7.5 million people, and about 120 deaths so far from SARS-CoV2.

Though, a lot of this boils down to the fatality rate of the original SARS being something like 10%, so it was more terrifying but ultimately less dangerous on a population level due to lower transmissibility.

And we have a global mindset in Europe, right? So we could have learned from others. But somehow nobody invested in contact tracing infrastructure, PPE production, etc. Why? Because you can't justify more spending for something that "could happen". There's an enormous tax burden already in the EU, and governments will be struggling even more with healthcare costs in the next decades. I doubt someone will stockpile millions of KN95 masks "just in case" after the pandemic is over. Because that costs money.

East Asia in general has done really well with Covid. In the US, I fear that nobody will learn anything from Covid. Those who treated it as nothing more than the flu will come out of this feeling that they were right all along and treat the next pandemic exactly the same way. There was one guy interviewed at the Trump rally in Tulsa who had a friend die from Covid and still went to a rally without a mask saying he didn't know what to think about the pandemic.

On the flip side, it is a technological miracle that 1 year and a day after I was last in the office, I was able to get my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine (or, for that matter, that a vaccine even existed).

Technology is the only thing we humans have going for us. Our collective memory is just as poor now as it was thousands of years ago

More of a very large DOS attack, but in all seriousness what would happen if some rogue state decided to launch a missile into the side of one of these in the missile of the canal, how long would clean up operation take.

How about a well placed 50-500kg? shaped charge to take out the rudder

Unless it happens to end up diagonally like this one, it would probably just be tugged off, no?

Actually ships already have the option to take the long way around Africa.

I don't think it's a single point of failure, more like a bottleneck with delays.

But over the last few decades we have been much more efficient with globalization, but the just-in-time aspect is like a traffic jam, where one slow spot makes everyone everywhere back up and wait in traffic affecting everything.

Factorio players know that feeling.

This would be one of those "carry a bunch of ingredients in my inventory and run" situations.

Most of the Suez Canal is twinned, this ship got stuck in the southern single lane area.

I think Egypt will more seriously consider twinning the southern part after this event.

It's a nice refresher about (anti)fragility.

fuggedaboutit

Umm.. There was never single point of failure. Just single point of delay. It's not as if there are perishable goods on those ships.

> Umm.. There was never single point of failure. Just single point of delay. It's not as if there are perishable goods on those ships.

What do you think they use reefer containers for? Container vessels often have loads of perishable goods on them. Though it's often biased one-way. E.g. Latin America to Europe? Loads and loads of bananas. Norway to anywhere? Salmon!

The bananas are green when plucked; they ripen during the voyage.

There are lots of livestock on ships in the queue, something on the order of 100,000 animals will literally perish.

If this is so, my guess is that there will be a lot of well fed fish on both sides of the Suez Canal.

Would they not just be able to transport more feed? (At least for most)

"The nearby ports of Said and Suez could be used to reload fodder if supplies run low, though the process may not be straightforward with so many ships in the queue."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/26/at-least...

Lots of goods shipped are effectively perishable, in that you may as well write them off and dump them somewhere if the shipment misses a particular sales season.

If that was true for the Evergreen ship, wouldn't they have dismantled the ship by now then? Not saying you're wrong overall, maybe it just doesn't apply to this particular shipment. As far as I know, we don't know exactly what is on the Ever Given.

> If that was true for the Evergreen ship, wouldn't they have dismantled the ship by now then?

The vessel is completely filled with containers. To discharge a container you need a crane. Further, some perishable things, that's why shippers have insurance.

Not sure what you mean with 'dismantle' though. It's rather obvious you never seen such a vessel up close. It's nor like a pc. If you want a specific container, it can often be a complete hassle to get to it. This as loads of other containers are stacked on top.

Even if it was empty and in a suitable dock, dismantling a ship that size would take weeks at minimum.

Except the sheep

The real stuck ship was the friends we made along the way

Somewhat ironically/unironically depending on your stance the author of the website appears to be selling the page as an NFT: https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...

With the current mania about NFTs, I think the sale might recoup the whole loss to the global economy.