The U.S.-built temporary pier taking humanitarian aid to starving Palestinians will be removed from the coast of Gaza to be repaired after getting damaged in rough seas and weather, the Pentagon said Tuesday.
Over the next two days, the pier will be pulled out and sent to the southern Israeli city of Ashdod, where U.S. Central Command will repair it, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters. She said the fixes will take “at least over a week” and then the pier will need to be anchored back into the beach in Gaza.
The pier, used to carry in humanitarian aid arriving by sea, is one of the few ways that food, water and other supplies are getting to Palestinians who the U.N. says are on the brink of famine amid the nearly 8-month-old war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The setback is the latest for the $320 million pier, which only began operations in the past two weeks and has already had three U.S. service members injured and had four of its vessels beached due to heavy seas. Deliveries also were halted for two days last week after crowds rushed aid trucks coming from the pier and one Palestinian man was shot dead. After that, the U.S. military worked with the U.N. and Israeli officials to select safer alternate routes for trucks, the Pentagon said Friday.
Jesus Christ…
Being a carpenter he would have built it better.
Seriously though, how was this not foreseen?
It was a rush job. I’m not surprised things were missed.
That said it’s an extraordinary amount of money spent when the simpler solution would have been to tie continued Israeli funding with opening the Rafah crossing (and providing protection for the goods).
“Ocean waters can be rough” is a big fucking thing to miss when building a floating pier.
If it’s DoD, most of the capabilities for quick pier building only need to last long enough to get gear and personnel on land.
Fun story: in WW2 a concrete mixing ship was converted to an ice cream machine.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge
This wasn’t supposed to be that quick though, was it? I thought this was going to be the primary way aid was going to get into Gaza. It could potentially need to last a very long time.
Who can say? Could equally have been either a temporary solution, or just a really shoddy “permanent” solution by the lowest bidder.
I’m inclined to think temporary just for speed, potentially (ideally) with plans in place for something more long term.
An alternative purpose of a temporary structure could be also be to not piss off israel (for some reason, they care about that) by giving Palestinians access to a stable port.
In the original announcement, it was stated as temporary.
https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3702062/pentagon-press-secretary-air-force-maj-gen-pat-ryder-holds-a-press-briefing/
He was in fact not a carpenter, but probably a mason. The whole carpenter thing is a mis translation.
Rock and Stone!
More likely he didn’t exist other than as an itinerant preacher. It would be weird for the son of the creator of the universe to redo party tricks already attributed to previous gods.
TIL …
No, you didn’t. Don’t just take that kind of information from some joker in an internet forum. They provided no evidence or even citations, so now, unless you looked into carefully in the meantime, you don’t know anything that you didn’t know before.
Five minutes of googling says some folks thing stone mason. Some copy and paste response says unskilled tradesman. Other response says translation is just “learned” so maybe they could read.
I’d never heard of this before so seeing that there is disagreement is a fun new thing for me. Especially interesting to see this “learned” response.
I spent a few minutes looking to see if a name I trust said any of this. Ultimately I don’t have the background to evaluate it and lots of folks spend their lives about historical Jesus. I didn’t see anything from anyone I recognized but, like I said, I don’t know much about this area.
The word used to describe Jesus’s occupation in Greek is ‘technōn’ (Mark 6:3), which means something like ‘builder’. In terms of etymological root, ‘technician’ might be closer. It commonly referred to carpenters, but also masons. There’s an argument to be made that with Roman involvement in the area there were a lot of Roman summer stone building projects, making it more likely Jesus was a mason than a carpenter.
Maybe he was a roofer?
It took about 2 months to become operational (don’t know the exact time, but close to or exactly the planned 6-8 building time), used for 2 weeks, then on maintenance for a week. Spent $320M on this already.
Jesus Christ, indeed.
https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3702062/pentagon-press-secretary-air-force-maj-gen-pat-ryder-holds-a-press-briefing/