Well, there's always the option of just demolishing the ship and its cargo, getting everything out of the canal without worrying about whether any of it survives the process.
That would still be expensive, but is it more expensive than blocking the canal?
How do you destroy a 1300 ft ship with 20k+ TEUs of cargo on it? How do you then clean all of the debris out of a pretty narrow and shallow canal so that other ships can go through again?
I can't imagine that being a very quick thing to do.
I came to this purely to do a CTRL+F "explosion" and was dismayed to see all the comments proposing it voted down, whereas comments proposing things like balloons being used to lift the boat were not voted down.
Clearly demolition is one of the things to consider in this scenario, and is at least as realistic as the million-luftballons. It would also make for some fun conversation.
>How do you destroy a 1300 ft ship with 20k+ TEUs of cargo on it?
A smaller less stuck ship or barge you don't care very much about full of explosives.
And you don't need to destroy the whole thing, just shred and distribute the part that's in the canal enough that it's no longer an impediment to navigation. Sure you might be left with 30 big chunks but 30 big chunks can be picked up with conventional marine construction equipment. If the bulbous bow is still buried in the sand then whatever, you don't care.
We're talking about a Mont-Blanc sized explosion here. Definitively messy but with modern engineering I think you could whip up a directed blast that ensures the task is accomplished without unnecessarily digging a hole or some other dumb side effect.
It's still easier to dislodge a giant ship in one piece than it is to remove one giant ship's worth of random metal shrapnel from a narrow, shallow canal.
Who said anything about shrapnel? There's another comment in the thread making the case that "we don't want to just tug harder on the boat, because that might tear a hole in the hull". That could destroy the boat, but... so what?
Because if you destroy the boat and it sinks that will make the passage unusable for a long time? I mean currently it seems possible to drag the ship out of this problem but if it's no longer floating you might need to start sawing it into pieces like this example of the sunken Tricolor https://youtu.be/0ENOJBLVgjw . That will take months and will have a serious global economic impact.
Because then you'd still have to remove everything, but now you don't have one big, controllable system, but you have lots of pieces that will move in unpredictable ways.
The canal is shallow and narrow, and gravity isn't working in your favor here. A ship has a natural tendency to float (even if it currently isn't). Pieces of debris don't. You will have to remove all pieces that break off, one-by-one.
That would still be expensive, but is it more expensive than blocking the canal?