Does anyone know who pays for this process? I would imagine the owner of the ship, but I imagine there's a non-zero likelihood that something like this could bankrupt them. In that case... is there mandatory insurance or similar?
Depends on the jurisdiction. In many countries, yes there are insurance requirements. Even in ones where there aren't, most vessels owned by larger companies carry insurance for the same reason anyone else does.
On the other hand, since oceangoing ships are (mostly) regulated by the countries they're registered in, which is frequently a regulation-light jurisdiction like Panama, Liberia, or the Marshall Islands - there are a surprising number of situations where the owner of the ship just completely disappears and the ship is left to rot.
One of the most famous recent examples of this was the ship involved in the Beirut port explosion this year. After being impounded for being unseaworthy, it rotted at its moorings and eventually capsized in the Beirut harbor.
A quick trip through developing-country ports on Google Earth will have quite a few ships like this.
Curiously, this vessel appears to have been registered in the Marshal Islands, which is an independent nation with a rather unusual relationship [0] to the US that I hadn't heard of before. Presumably the law that requires US registration has a special provision allowing this? I wonder if the crew requirements are more relaxed with a Marshal Islands registration?
The difference is that the law only applies to ships that carry goods or passengers from one US port to another. Ships are allowed to (and often do) call at multiple US ports on a voyage, they just can't unload goods in one US port that were loaded in another.
For instance, the ship could have carried cars made at the Kia and Hyundai plants in Mexico to the US, and also loaded cars made at the plants in Georgia and Alabama for delivery to the Middle East.
That's substantially less than I would have expected. It means each car was valued at ~$20,000. I would have expected the ship itself to cost ~$250,000,000, but the HMM Algeciras, the biggest container ship in the world, only cost $140,000,000 to build. https://www.shippingandfreightresource.com/hmm-algeciras-lar...
The insurers of the ship and/or cargo would be paying to salvage whatever value they can extract from the wreck, to reduce their losses. You’re right about the non-zero chance of insurmountable loss, which is why the owner of the ship and the owner of the cargo would both have a shitload of insurance. Read about Lloyd’s and the shipping insurance business. People have been doing this for hundreds of years.
There are also fines for polluting the water. It wouldn't surprise me if the harbor authority was also levying a daily fine for blocking access to the port.
Definitely, but it’s the difference between losing $100 million or $99 million. They’ve already sustained the loss, the only thing to do now is try and offset it.
Scrap steel is worth $0.20 per kg. There is 28 million kg there, so the whole ship is worth $5.6 million in scrap value alone. That probably pays for the operation.
That gantry alone costs more than that. All of the salaries and fuel costs and everything are way more expensive. However, the ship is a navigation and ecological hazard so it has to go. I have no doubt my tax dollars are helping.
