Just How Big is the Dali Container Ship?

I’ve seen a few attempts to illustrate the size of the Dali container ship that hit the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore, and I thought I’d get in on the fun. At least that was the plan a few days ago when I got an idea for this timely post and finished 90% of it. Then I got distracted by real life. I was going to abandon this, but…the images are kind of fun, so here it is…about a week too late.

I’m using a digital model of a container ship by Jabhnko R. that I found on the Trimble 3D warehouse. It is not a model of the Dali, but it was almost the right size. I’ve scaled it up slightly to match the published dimensions of the Dali and loaded it into Google Earth at some interesting locations.

My first thought was to show it next to Comiskey Park — the place where the White Sox play, whatever they’re calling it these days:

That’s pretty big – it fills the parking lot. But I wanted more.

My next thought was to show it next to something very familiar, the White House. Everybody has some idea of how big that is. It doesn’t look great, however, because Google Earth doesn’t make available any 3D models or high-quality images of the National Mall, presumably at the request of the U.S. government for security reasons. So I had to add a White House model to get a comparison image.

That certainly illustrates the size of it, but the image just doesn’t pop. I needed someplace else that was recognizable… How about Disney World in Florida?

That looks huge.

And for those of us who remember the scenes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind set at Devil’s Tower, Wyoming:

On the other hand, as big as it is, we have built bigger things. Here it is next to one of them, Hoover Dam, and it looks quite reasonable. Although you sure wouldn’t want that thing to actually hit the dam…