This happened this morning, and holy cow, this thing is WEDGED.
I was thinking of cracking a joke about how the captain couldn’t be bothered to get directions, but having the Suez blocked is pretty significant.
And, of course, my paranoia is whispering to me (it’s not a clinical paranoia, just my brain being able to conceive of evil scenarios) that this is not a case of sometimes shit happens, it’s a case of someone deliberately blocking the canal and the ship is actually a really HUGE floating bomb and someone is just waiting for the maximum number of emergency personnel and equipment to show up before making things go BOOM. (There’s always a BOOM tomorrow.)
Someone talk me down from the paranoia?
And if anyone has ideas about how this happened in the first place or how they might be able to unwedge the ship, I’m interested.
Oh, yeah, and if my paranoid scenario were true (instead of just my wildly overactive imagination), how big a crater would a bomb that size make, and how long would it take to repair the Suez Canal? Or would they have to dig a new one?
Easy there, Tex. If your goal is a terrorist attack on the Suez canal, you don’t have to wait for “the maximum number of emergency personnel and equipment to show up.” You don’t even have to stall the vessel. You just wait for the vessel to reach the most strategic choke point and blow it up right then.
From that image, it looks like there are roads on both sides of the canal. A crane on each side pulling the stern and bow in opposite directions seems the obvious solution.
As I understand it, the Suez Canal is just a ditch from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. There aren’t any locks to change levels and control the water flow, or which could be damaged by sabotage. While blowing up a ship in the canal would not be trivial, the fix might be as simple as removing the debris and dredging to the required depth.
Just to be clear, I do not actually think this is a terrorist plot. It’s just that every now and again my brain likes to serve up what-if scenarios that are, at best, somewhat plausible but not at all likely.
A)That’s neat.
B)How many ships are normally waiting to get through. Granted it’s only been a few hours and those things don’t exactly move all that fast, but there’s a whole lot of them sitting on either side. But maybe that’s normal.
