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News Index:
- Ever Given Report Highlights Suez Canal Pilots’ Role in Grounding (July 13, 2023
- Ever Given: Ship that blocked Suez Canal sets sail after deal signed (July 7, 2021)
- Ever Given's insurer said the Suez Canal operators were the ones in control of the ship before it got stuck (June 3, 2021)
- Suez Canal Authority Blames Ever Given Accident On Ship's Captain (June 4, 2021)
- Egypt court upholds seizure of ship that blocked Suez Canal (May 4, 2021)
- Egypt impounds Ever Given ship over $900 million Suez Canal compensation bill (April 14, 2021)
- Investigation into Ever Given begins (March 29, 2021)
- Traffic in Suez Canal to resume after giant container ship is finally dislodged
- Egyptian authorities say 'human error' may be to blame for the Suez crash (March 28, 2021)
- ‘Aladdin’s cave’ of goods and livestock worth billions of dollars stuck in Suez Canal blockage
- Strong winds or human error?
- As the full moon brings rising tides, crews race to free the Ever Given.
- Fears for livestocks onboard as fresh bid to dislodge stranded Suez Canal container ship gets under way (March 26, 2021)
- U.S Navy sending team to Suez Canal to help dig out massive ship blocking passage
- Here's How A Long Shutdown Of The Suez Canal Might Roil The Global Economy (March 26, 2021)
- Global Trade Gets Rerouted With Suez Canal Still Blocked by Ship (March 26, 2021)
- Cargo ship still stuck across Suez Canal, but Egyptian official says it will be freed over weekend
- Shipping losses mount from cargo vessel stuck in Suez Canal
- Suez Canal: Owner of cargo ship blocking waterway apologises (March 25, 2021)
- Cargo ship "Ever Given" is still stuck and blocking traffic in the Suez Canal
Gosh damn, my friends in the Logistics sector are tearing their hair out from this disaster.
Every day that behemoth is firmly lodged in the Suez canal is another day of massive losses, and it would cost hundreds of thousands more in fuel cost for each cargo ship to spend an extra 2 weeks sailing around the Horn of Africa.
Suez Canal Blocked After Giant Container Ship Gets Stuck
The ship, stretching more than 1,300 feet, ran aground and blocked one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes, leaving more than 100 ships stuck at each end of the canal.
The ship, stretching more than 1,300 feet, ran aground and blocked one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes, leaving more than 100 ships stuck at each end of the canal.
CAIRO — Trying to convey the sheer scale of the nearly quarter-mile-long container ship that has been stuck in the Suez Canal since Tuesday evening, some news outlets compared it to the length of four soccer fields. Others simply called it gigantic.
But the main thing to know was this: After powerful winds forced the ship aground on one of the canal’s banks, it was big enough to block nearly the entire width of the canal, producing a large traffic jam in one of the world’s most important maritime arteries.
By Wednesday morning, more than 100 ships were stuck at each end of the 120-mile canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and carries roughly 10 percent of worldwide shipping traffic. Only the Panama Canal looms as large in the global passage of goods.
“The Suez Canal is the choke point,” said Capt. John Konrad, founder of the shipping news website gCaptain.com, noting that 90 percent of the world’s goods are transported on ships. It “could not happen in a worse place,” he said, “and the timing’s pretty bad, too.”
The potential fallout is vast. The vessels caught in the bottleneck or expected to arrive there in the coming days include oil tankers carrying about one-tenth of a day’s total global oil consumption, according to Kpler, a market research firm, to say nothing of the rest of the cargo now waiting to traverse the canal.
And if the ship is not freed within a few days, it would add one more burden to a global shipping industry already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, creating delays, shortages of goods and higher prices for consumers.
The ship, the Ever Given, was heading from China to the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It ran aground amid poor visibility and high winds from a sandstorm that struck much of northern Egypt this week, according to George Safwat, a spokesman for the Suez Canal Authority. The storm caused an “inability to direct the ship,” he said in a statement.
A spokesman for GAC, a shipping agent at the canal, cautioned in an email that there was “up to this moment no progress” on clearing the canal. It was unclear how long the rescue operation might take.
Lt. General Osama Rabie, the head of the canal authority, said that an older section of the canal was being used to help ease the traffic jam in the waterway.
Tiny against their quarry’s bulk, swarms of tugboats raced to try to wrench the Ever Given free, and a front-end loader strained to dig it out from the canal’s eastern embankment, where its bow sat wedged. Continued high winds, along with the sheer size of the ship, complicated the task, according to GAC.
The ship’s size has magnified every challenge. Though a gust of wind may seem an improbable David to the ship’s Goliath, the containers stacked at least nine-high atop the deck would have acted like a giant sail, Capt. Konrad said, giving Tuesday’s high winds more surface area to push against.
As container ships have grown in scale, culminating in a new generation of ultra-large ships that includes the 1,312-foot-long Ever Given, the Suez Canal and global ports have struggled to keep pace. Parts of the canal were widened several years ago, though not enough to eliminate the tension for pilots charged with navigating it. Crew sizes have not increased to match the vessels, said Capt. Konrad, and technology for piloting through narrow channels has not improved.
Then there is the matter of rescue. If the ship’s bulk makes it impossible to drag out by tugboat, a salvage crew may need to lighten it by removing containers, pumping out the water tanks that serve as its ballast and dredging around the bow and stern, he said.
When a similarly sized ship, the CSCL Indian Ocean, became stuck in 2016 near the port of Hamburg, Germany, it took 12 tugboats and nearly a week to free it.
The Suez Canal is a key artery for oil flows from the Persian Gulf region to Europe and North America. Roughly 5 percent of globally traded crude oil and 10 percent of refined petroleum products passed through the canal before the pandemic, estimated David Fyfe, chief economist at Argus Media, a market research firm.
After the canal was snarled, there was a 2.85 percent jump in the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, on Wednesday to $62.52 a barrel. But Mr. Fyfe said that because the demand for oil remained relatively weak amid the pandemic, a short-term outage was unlikely to have a lasting effect on the market.
If the Egyptian authorities are able to move the Ever Given to the side of the waterway within two to three days, the episode will likely prove a minor inconvenience to the shipping industry. Shipping companies generally build in extra days to their schedules to account for delays.
But if the ship’s extraction takes longer, it could pose a substantial risk for an already-overwhelmed industry. Global trade has been disrupted as locked-down American consumers ordered vast quantities of factory goods from Asia, yielding a monthslong shortage of shipping containers, the metal boxes that carry parts and finished products around the globe.
The blockage of the Suez Canal will affect the movement of things like exercise bikes and printers built in Chinese factories destined for American households, and soybeans grown on American farms and shipped to food processors in Southeast Asia.
If it remains clogged for more than a few days, the stakes would rise significantly.
“If that’s going to be a knock-on delay, then you’ll see piling up and bunching up of ships on their arrival in Europe as well,” said Akhil Nair, vice president of global carrier management at SEKO Logistics in Hong Kong. “It’s just one more factor that we didn’t need.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/world/middleeast/suez-canal-blocked-ship.html
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Over 360 cargo ships and oil/LNG supertankers are stuck and waiting at each end of the canal as of Sunday:
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