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Storrowing goes international

OK, it's a boat turned sideways, not a boat with its roof peeled off by a bridge, but the principle's the same, no?


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Comments

Nah, it's just a jack-knived semi on I-93 in Charlestown on the Friday afternoon of a three day weekend.

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Agreed. This is some kind of fuckup, obviously, but at least the boat was where it was supposed to be.

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Because where else do trucks end up if not I-93 Jackknifed first?

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Lumber Jerk perhaps?

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https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1374483438066012165

Basically, we now have a massive shipping traffic jam, with ships backed up into the seas at both ends of the canal.

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What can you expect, though.
Boston is the Hub of the Universe and the home of The Storrow. Imitation is the ....

I’m just so proud of what we do.

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The trucks are in the containers. That ship is bigger than you think. You Storrow on a roof.

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Southie Longshoremen will pick the cargo in an afternoon to lighten the ship. Sandhogs will dig the bow free. Boston Towing will push the bow clear. Price is 25% of the value of the ship plus the cargo, but the cargo will disappear in the process.

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The bow is stuck into the side of the canal, I think that counts. I know a ship trying to pass under a bridge and hitting it would be more in line with classic cases of storrowing. But I think it's closer to a storrowing than a jack-knifing, IMLAO.

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It's kind of like getting stuck in a snowbank on a narrow street or driveway.

Have they tried spinning the wheel left and right and hitting the gas? That oughta do it.

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you will hit that canal.

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We’ve all been there.

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Some joker put a "low clearance ahead" sign out on the shore. They saw it, thought they were too tall for the next bridge, didn't want to wait for a trooper, so tried to make a K-turn.
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There actually is some real concern for height clearance for the big ships. A couple of years ago in NJ, they finished a project to raise a bridge deck (something like 65 feet, I think) to ensure more of the biggest modern container ships could get through to the port.

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Just kind of inverse - between the bottom of the boat and the bottom of the canal.

This guy got blown into the shore during the high winds and low visibility associated with a haboob. It isn't the first time, either. They may have to start closing the canal during sandstorms.

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I think you're referring to the Bayonne Bridge between Bayonne, NJ and Staten Island, NY. It was a pretty amazing feat of engineering, raising the roadway 65 feet while keeping the bridge open to traffic (and also of course the waterway underneath the bridge). Lots of container ships do travel on the Kill Van Kull, but as far as I know none ever got stuck under the bridge, even before they raised it...

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Yes, the Bayonne Bridge. Amazing job.
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https://youtu.be/APJBuEbbc3M
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When I last lived and worked in the area ~25 years ago, there was no problem for most of the existing shipping traffic. Somebody in the mix, however, had enough sense to see which way the wind was blowing (no pun intended) with the construction of larger & larger ships. I believe some of the biggest at that time (or soon after) could only get through under the bridge by folding down their hinged aerials. They realized the container/intermodal port could become marginalized and mean a big economic hit to the region.
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The bigger concern (or perhaps more immediate) that I remember from the time was the difficulty they had getting dredging permits for the shipping channels. A couple of centuries of heavy "industry" and you can imagine there was some amount of toxic silt lining the bottom of the harbor.
Since environmental regulations had tightened up at whatever previous point, the navigable channels to/around the container port (already a shallower part of the harbor than others*) were approaching bare-bones minimum for bigger ships of the time (maybe 40 feet?). There were a lot of regulatory hoops to jump through to get those channels dredged to 45 feet.
In fact, I think they might sometimes have had (unless I'm mixing in another story, which is entirely possible) a Catch-22 of wanting high tide for keel/bottom clearance, but high tide being bad for overhead clearance at the bridge!
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* spending debates and regional politics came into it, too, especially with the Port being a bi-state agency. A lot of noise was made about how the natural channel and basin at the underused Brooklyn Navy Yard was at 65 feet at that moment, with no dredging needed. The flip side, of course, being that there were no freight rail connections from Long Island to the contiguous mainland, which would mean MUCH extra truck traffic on area expressways. Which would lead into the history lesson recriminations that one of the only specific things (supposedly) the PA actually had been chartered to do decades earlier (before becoming a bridge operator, road tunnel operator, rapid transit operator, airport operator, and landlord) was to build a freight connection across NY harbor.

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you gotta understand...

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At least one mast has to be sheared off before a ship is "Storrowed".

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A lot of the big ships actually have hinged masts (for communications & navigation) that fold down for those tight overhead clearance situations.

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First time this long time listener has noticed.
Well done, Adam.

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News reports indicate the ship encountered a massive sandstorm that reduced visibility to zero. The ship, which is the height of a 20 story building and is a quarter mile in length, is laden with ten thousand + cargo containers. Those stacked containers acted like a sail, catching the intense sandstorm winds and blowing the huge ship into the bank of the canal.

All of this however doesn’t explain why PRIOR to their newfound notoriety for delaying 10% of the world’s commerce, while waiting to enter the canal they took the time to navigate their ship so that it created a picture of a giant penis when viewed on radar.

JoeMyGod sums up the latest growing developments:

https://www.joemygod.com/2021/03/massive-container-ship-currently-blocki...

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while waiting to enter the canal they took the time to navigate their ship so that it created a picture of a giant penis when viewed on radar.

Ahah! We now know what Jeremy Clarkson's new job is. Ship's navigator.

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