> Considering how many eyes are on this right now, what do you think is going to happen the first time someone dies?
Considering how many goods and how much money is being blocked up by this the response may be loud from come parties but I doubt governments will care enough to stop it.
Some estimates I saw put the estimate at 10 billion dollars of goods being held up by the jammed ship and the costs of delays caused by sailing around the Cape instead will probably put a multiple on to that number before this is all over. There are construction projects in that corner of the globe worth far less that kill far more than just a few people but that hasn't really slowed them down much has it?
From a system design perspective, it's kind of nuts that the entire planet has only one single canal connecting two major bodies of water, and it's in a country with a, shall we say, precarious government. Surely such a single point of failure is a massive risk. Granted, geography doesn't leave us many choices, but could we at least build another, parallel canal to it?
There is another alternative: going around the southern tip of Africa. While this adds a couple weeks to trip time it also saves the massive Suez Canal transit tolls.
Yeah and I'm under the impression that the fees are balanced so that it costs roughly the same amount to take either route. Ships only choose Suez because it's faster.
The Suez is at basically the one point it makes sense to build it. The next closest is off the Gulf of Aqaba and that's right on the border of Egypt and Israel. It really doesn't make sense for Egypt to go through the trouble of cutting a second one on the one in a million shot a ship gets stuck like this. The usual answer is just make sure they don't get stuck rather than spend the billions of dollars cutting a second canal would cost. Even if Egypt was somehow charged the losses for this screw up that probably wouldn't be enough to make it worth cutting a second backup canal.
The difference would be in the hyper-visibility of the deaths.
To show what I mean, compare the level of reporting and political backlash from [1], involving two construction workers against [2], involving 11 other deaths, that were only revealed after an audit. Visibility matters. I don't think it's unfair to say that if any deaths happen here that there would be far more global visibility than [1].
And besides, it's a silly armchair idea that doesn't make any sense whatsoever after ten minutes of scrutiny.
Considering how many goods and how much money is being blocked up by this the response may be loud from come parties but I doubt governments will care enough to stop it.
Some estimates I saw put the estimate at 10 billion dollars of goods being held up by the jammed ship and the costs of delays caused by sailing around the Cape instead will probably put a multiple on to that number before this is all over. There are construction projects in that corner of the globe worth far less that kill far more than just a few people but that hasn't really slowed them down much has it?