How would Panama canal profile have played into the Ever Given incident? It's not like it happened because someone accidentally drove a Panamax into Suez due to confusing continents. (Suezmax is bigger anyways)

It’s more that it would help the industry standardize on one size, which meant facilities in all places could also standardize and ensure edge cases are properly taken care of. The current status quo is “we have a strait, and the biggest boat you can squeeze into that should be able to pass through”; a standardized approach would be “if you build a boat X by Y, we guarantee it will go through - because we can basically put it on rails once you get here”. It’s a bit like they did with containers: from “build the biggest box we can fit on a ship” to “build the box that ships can guarantee will be optimally treated”.

But they don't run on rails. Size didn't play into Ever Given in any way other than that smaller would have been easier to dredge/pull out, and that smaller may or may not have had a more favorable ratio between rudder control and wind load.

Any attempts at standardization would actually be worse, because now they build each ship for exactly one actual canal. With standardization they'd get built to some document that will get interpreted slightly different in every place.

Standardization would allow canal operators to build better and safer tooling around the strait, allowing for more slack and so on.

The alternative is simply to continue as it is, with ship builders squeezing every inch just because they can, and it becomes a matter of if, not when, another EverGiven happens.

The whole shipping facilities industry is being pushed by the shipping companies to widen/deepen canals and ports. It's a bit of a rat race.

But as the Evergiven incident has shown, it has a limit. We were lucky it didn't get stuck worse than it has.

> We were lucky it didn't get stuck worse than it has

At some point it makes sense to just blow up the ship to free the channel.

Real life is not like video games. Blowing something up doesn’t make it disappear; it could actually spread debris chunks everywhere and (in addition to the collateral damage factor) make the problem worse

People just don't get the scale of things like this, do they? Ever Given is taller than the canal is deep when empty. Blow it to bits and you'll get some bits that are at least as deep as the canal.

I am genuinely interested in learning how you think that could possibly be workable. The reason I ask is that I am not particularly knowledgeable about either explosives or the canal but I can instantly envision a number of reasons why such a course of action would be completely unworkable.

I think it's always interesting to get another perspective and I am somewhat disappointed that people have downvoted you without even wanting to hear your reasons. Such conversations are always an opportunity to either learn or to teach for those that are open to it.

I think part of it may be that it's a new account, using a gibberish name. That's not a good prior for "will be an interesting discussion to engage in" when the comment is also missing some fairly obvious step in the thought process.