MANSHIYET RUGOLA, Egypt – The giant container ship that blocked world trade by being trapped on the banks of the Suez Canal rose over the dusty brick house of Umm Gaafar for four days, humming its deep mechanical hum.
She looked up from where she was sitting on the rugged dirt road and considered what the vessel, the Always Given, could be carrying in all those containers. Flat screen TVs? Large refrigerators, washing machines or ceiling fans? Neither she nor her neighbors in the village of Manshiyet Rugola, with a population of 5,000, had any of these at home.
“Why don’t they pull one of those containers?” joked Umm Gaafar, 65. “There may be something good there. Maybe I could feed the city. “
The Japanese-owned Ever Given and the nearly 300 cargo ships now waiting to cross the Suez Canal, one of the most important navigation arteries in the world, could supply Manshiyet Rugola many, many times.
Transporting cars, oil, livestock, laptops, jet fuel, scrap, grain, sweaters, sneakers, appliances, toilet paper, toys, medical equipment and more, ships should supply much of the world, and the canal should have been the fastest route from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and the east coast of the United States.
A channel navigation agent said Saturday morning that dredges had managed to dig into the back of the ship, and a spokesman for the Suez Canal Economic Zone posted on Facebook that the ship’s rudder had been released. But as a rescue team and channel officials continued to struggle to dislodge the leviathan from four sandbank football fields where it ran aground on Tuesday, blocking all ship traffic across the channel, global supply chains have stirred up get closer to a complete crisis.
Navigation analysts estimate that colossal congestion was already holding nearly $ 10 billion in daily transactions.
“All of the global retail trade moves in containers, or 90% of them,” said Alan Murphy, the founder of Sea-Intelligence, a marine analytics and data company. “So everything is impacted. Name any brand and they will be trapped in one of these boats. “
Decreasing the bottleneck depends on the rescuers’ ability to clear the sand and mud where Ever Given is trapped and to lighten the ship’s load enough to help it float again, while the tugboats try to push and pull it to the ground. outside. The best chance may come on Monday, when the spring tide will raise the channel’s water level by about 18 inches, analysts and shipping agents said.
On Friday, the company that oversees the ship’s operations and crew, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, said more and bigger tugs arrived to help, with two more to deliver on Sunday. Several dredgers, including a specialized suction dredge that can extract 2,000 cubic meters of material per hour, were digging around the bow of the vessel, which is jammed on the eastern bank of the channel, the company said. He added that high-capacity pumps would start pumping water from the vessel’s ballast tanks to make the ship lighter.
A video taken from the ship and provided by Mohammed Mosselhy, owner of First Suez International, a maritime logistics company on the canal, showed several excavators continuously digging at the edge of the turquoise water near the bow of the ship.
The team of eight Dutch rescue specialists and naval architects who oversee the operation will need to research the ship and the seabed and create a computer model that will help you get around the ship without damaging it, said Captain Nick Sloane, a master South African rescue team that led the operation to fix the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that sank in 2012 off the coast of Italy.
They will need to remove other vessels from the area, a major coordination effort. And they will need to take into account the possibility that the Ever Given stranding has reorganized the seabed, making it difficult for other ships to pass through the area, even after it was moved, said Captain Paul Foran, a maritime consultant who worked on the other rescue operations.
At all times, they must expect the Ever Given to remain intact. With the ship sinking in the middle, the bow and stern stuck in positions for which it was not designed, the hull is vulnerable to stresses and cracks, the two experts said.
Mosselhy said teams of divers were already inspecting the hull and have yet to find any damage. But in most other respects, Semper Dado succumbed to Murphy’s Law: everything that could go wrong has gone, starting with the size of the ship, among the largest in the world.
“It was the largest ship on the convoy and it ended up in the worst part of the channel” – a narrow section with only one strip, said Captain Sloane. “And that was really unfortunate.”
If tugs, dredgers and pumps fail to do the job, they can be accompanied by a series of specialized ships and specialized machines, requiring perhaps hundreds of workers: small oil tankers to suck the ship’s fuel; the tallest cranes in the world to unload some of their containers one by one; and, if no cranes are tall or close enough, heavy helicopters that can collect containers of up to 20 tons – although no one has said where the cargo would go. (A full 40-foot container can weigh up to 40 tons.)
Captain Sloane estimated that the operation would take at least a week. When a ship of similar size, the CSCL Indian Ocean, ran aground near the port of Hamburg in 2016, it took almost six days to clear the Elbe.
All this because, simply: “This is a very large ship; this is a very big problem, ”said Richard Meade, chief editor of Lloyd’s List, a London-based maritime intelligence publication. “I don’t think there is any doubt that they have everything they need. It is just a matter of, it is a very big problem. “
If the ship breaks free on Monday, the shipping industry may absorb the inconvenience, analysts said, but in addition, supply chains and consumers may begin to see major disruptions.
Some ships have already decided not to wait, making the U-turn from Suez to make the long journey around the southern tip of Africa, a trip that can add weeks to the trip and cost more than $ 26,000 an extra day in fuel costs.
In Manshiyet Rugola, whose name translates to “Little Village of Manhood”, traffic jams of any kind would be difficult to imagine in normal times.
Donkey carts full of shamrocks went down semi-paved paths between low brick houses and green fields lined with palm trees, garbage and animal dung. A teenager sold ice cream from his motorcycle. Roosters offered profane competition for the midday call to prayer. Until the appearance of Semper Dado, the minarets of the most imposing mosques were the tallest structures around.
“Do you want to see the ship?” a boy asked two visiting journalists, floating in excitement under his car window. Since the earthquake-like crash of the stranded ship caused many to wake up around 7 am on Tuesday, Always Given had been the only issue in town.
“The whole village was there watching,” said Youssef Ghareeb, 19, a factory worker. “We were so used to having her around, because we lived on our roofs just watching the ship for four days.”
Everyone agreed that the view was even better at night, when the ship shone with light: a skyscraper rising from the horizon of a large city, tipped over on its side.
“When it lights up at night, it’s like the Titanic,” said Nadia, who, like her neighbor Umm Gaafar, refused to give her full name because of security forces in the area. “Only the necklace from the movie is missing.”
Umm Gaafar had asked to use his nickname so as not to conflict with government security guards who passed by, warning residents not to take pictures of the canal and spreading widespread unease. Nadia said she was too intimidated to take pictures of the ship at night, although she really wanted to.
Villagers and shipping analysts had the same question about Semper Dado, if based on different experiences. The ship’s operators insisted that the ship ran aground due to the strong winds of a sandstorm, with the stacked containers acting like a giant sail, but other ships on the same convoy passed without incident. The same happened with previous ships in previous storms, the villagers pointed out.
“We’ve seen worse winds,” said Ahmad al-Sayed, 19, a security guard, “but nothing like this has happened before.”
Shipping experts said the wind may well have been the main factor, exacerbating other physical forces, but suggested that human error may also have come into play.
“I’m asking a lot, why were you the only one who ran aground?” Captain Foran said. “But they can talk about it all later. Now, they just need to get that beast out of the channel. “
Nada Rashwan contributed reporting.