The Daily Beast
Releasing the Suez Canal container ship may overturn it
Reuters As the global shipping industry bleeds $ 400 million every hour, the huge container ship Ever Given remains trapped in the sand of the Suez Canal, an elite rescue team in Egypt is facing an entirely different problem: how to make a heavy ship stuck in quicksand weighs less without turning? “They will need a complete survey of the seabed and the bottom of the canal to see the extent of the stranding,” Nick Sloane, the rescue master who miraculously led the removal of the Costa Concordia cruise ship in 2014 off the island of Giglio, told The Daily Beast. “The worst case is that the ship is currently supported in the bow and stern areas, which means possible sinks in the middle.” These sinks can cause the ship to split in two, spilling fuel and cargo – which includes COVID-19 supplies such as respirators and personal protective equipment made in China – into the channel, making it temporarily impassable. “The risk is that it can also become heavy at the top and turn,” said Captain John Konrad, founder and CEO of the gCaptain navigation industry website. “And that would be catastrophic.” But before anyone can even think about reducing the huge ship – which is 1,312 feet long and 194 feet wide, 50 feet from the ship underwater – they would need to download the ship’s layout and run them through a series of computer-generated programs to determine what the download will do for balance. So they would have to somehow take a sea crane to Egypt, since the country is not tall enough to reach the top of Ever Given’s 20,000 containers. The information used to determine how to make the 200,000 metric tonne ship lighter enough to push it out of the sand, which buries the ship a little more with each passing tide, will be largely based on the ship’s own records – assuming they are correct and have not been falsified to pass what the Maritime Anti-Corruption Network has already called the most corrupt port system in the world. Exactly how this monster ship, which is about the size of the Empire State Building, got stuck in the riprap or in the channel’s sand banks is also a matter of debate. The ordeal has already become the subject of a series of memes and websites, with many parody accounts on Twitter producing memes from the huge bulldozer, which, next to the ship, looks like a child’s toy splintering in the sand at the bow of the ship. The Suez Canal, one of the most important sea routes in the world, is reportedly blocked because someone was accidentally trapped with its giant container ship. The photo is unreal. pic.twitter.com/I2ACkBqPi2— Marcel Dirsus (@marceldirsus) March 23, 2021 The ship sails under the flag of Panama, which is a common way of getting around human rights issues of great concern to its entirely Indian crew, who now you can’t leave the ship. It is owned by the Japanese company Shoei Kisen Kaisha, who apologized deeply for the rather expensive inconvenience. They say strong winds threw the ship on the sandbanks, but data so far shows that it was also traveling at 13 knots in an 8-knot speed zone when the accident happened, according to Konrad. Several rescuers also said the most likely cause was a power outage that compromised steering as soon as the gust of wind started. Coincidentally, this same ship was involved in an accident in Hamburg in 2019, when its owners collided with a ferry and destroyed it. They also blamed the accident for the loss of direction and strong winds at the time. Salvors say the next opportunity to move the ship will be during spring tides on Sunday and Monday. If that doesn’t work, it can take weeks to get it out of the sand, all the while trying to keep it upright and intact. Read more at The Daily Beast. Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Subscribe now! Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper into the stories that matter to you. To know more.