[250321.EN.SEA] Evergreen Ship Stuck in Suez Canal Imperils Shipping Worldwide

 

By Jon Gambrell and Samy Magdy

March 25, 2021 — 5.05pm

Ismalia, Egypt: A skyscraper-sized cargo ship wedged across Egypt’s Suez Canal further imperilled global shipping on Thursday with at least 150 other vessels needing to pass through the crucial waterway idled waiting for the obstruction to clear, authorities said.

The Ever Given, a Panama-flagged ship belonging to Taiwan-based shipping company Evergreen Marine, carries cargo between Asia and Europe. It ran aground on Tuesday in the narrow, man-made canal dividing continental Africa from the Sinai Peninsula. In the time since, efforts to free the ship using dredgers, digging and the aid of high tides have yet to push the container vessel aside.

On Thursday it was still blocking transit in both directions through one of the world’s busiest shipping channels for goods, oil, gas, grain and other products.

Roughly 30 per cent of the world’s shipping container volume transits through the 193-kilometre Suez Canal daily, and about 12 per cent of total global trade of all goods.

The Ever Given, built in 2018 with a length of nearly 400 metres and a width of 59 metres, is among the largest cargo ships in the world. It can carry some 20,000 containers at a time. It previously had been at ports in China before heading towards Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Egyptian officials and others were due to begin work again to free the vessel on Thursday morning after halting for the night.

So far, dredgers have tried to clear silt around the massive ship. Tug boats nudged the vessel alongside it, trying to gain momentum. From the shore, at least one backhoe dug into the canal’s sandy banks, suggesting the bow of the ship had ploughed into it.

Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, the company that manages the Ever Given, said the ship’s 25-member crew were safe and accounted for. The ship had two pilots from Egypt’s canal authority aboard the vessel to guide it when the grounding happened around 7.45am on Tuesday, the company said.

Source : The Sydney Morning Herald.