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This unintentionally taught me something cool: Placing the Ever Given on my street gave a surprisingly intuitive sense of scale. This seems way better than I could get from numbers.

Perhaps there's significant value in using a map overlay with spaces you are most familiar when showing scale; As opposed to using standard measurements, or units like football fields.



I put it in the local Target parking lot, it crushed the Wendy's, a strip mall and a few houses a street over.

Of course, the containers on that ship, could make a 20 mile/30km long train if they were double stacked.


Fully loaded, it’s about twice that. It carries up to 20,124 TEU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-foot_equivalent_unit) according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_Given, so that’s 402,480 feet. That’s 122.676 km. Double-stack and you get a wall of over 60km. And that doesn’t include space between containers. A train would be 70-ish km long.


Nice calculation. Financial Times here (https://www.ft.com/content/3dc797d0-7268-49a4-b0b5-3d11479cb...) claims "90 miles if they were loaded on a single-decked train", which Google tells me is about 144.8 kilometers!


I've read that the number of containers stalled because of this would be equivalent to a traffic jam from Chicago to El Paso


I hope the Ever Given doesn't run aground on the Maeslantkering when it arrives in Rotterdam!

https://imgur.com/a/O4bn2Pu

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

>The Maeslantkering ("Maeslant barrier" in Dutch) is a storm surge barrier on the Nieuwe Waterweg, in South Holland, Netherlands.[1] It was constructed from 1991 to 1997. Part of the Delta Works, the barriers are controlled by a supercomputer, and automatically close when Rotterdam (especially the Port of Rotterdam) is threatened by floods.

>Maeslantkering has two 210 meters long barrier gates, with two 237 meters long steel trusses holding them. When closed, the barrier will protect the entire width (360 meters) of the Nieuwe Waterweg, the main waterway of Port of Rotterdam. It is one of the largest moving structures on Earth, rivalling the Green Bank Telescope in the United States and the Bagger 288 excavator in Germany.


This certainly doesn't seem impossible since they've yet to ID what caused the ship to run aground. If it's pilot error, good luck Netherlands.


It did that too, then shifted it over a bit to find that it’s almost the same diameter as Apple Park. Gives insight into why people often bring bikes aboard massive ships like these!


There's a novel take on weights/measures standards here:

https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...




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