International efforts to dislodge the skyscraper-sized cargo ship that blocks Egypt’s Suez Canal intensified, but made little progress on Thursday as maritime congestion wreaked havoc on global trade.
Egyptian authorities said shipping was still “temporarily suspended” after the container got stuck on the side of the canal due to a strong dust storm and poor visibility.
This means that traffic remained at a standstill on a route that accounts for about 12% of global trade when the maritime transport saga surpassed the 48-hour mark.
A fleet of eight large tugboats has been dispatched to reflow the jammed container ship, the Suez Canal Authority said in a statement on Thursday.
Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen, which operates the stranded oil tanker, announced that two professional rescue teams from Japan and the Netherlands were now helping Egyptian authorities to come up with a “more effective plan”.
Meanwhile, the vessel’s technical manager, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, said he had “stepped up efforts” to rewire the ship, sending “specialized suction dredges” to the site after an unsuccessful attempt this morning.
“Another attempt will be made later today,” added the statement.
But experts said frantic fluctuation efforts could take longer than many expect.
Peter Berdowski, CEO of the Dutch company Boskalis, one of the maritime service providers that is currently trying to free the ship, said the rescue mission is far from simple.
“It’s like a huge stranded whale. It’s a huge burden on the sand, ”he said, in an interview with Dutch TV.
“We may have to work with a combination of weight reduction by removing containers, oil and water from the ship, tugs and sand dredging.”
“We cannot exclude that it can take weeks, depending on the situation,” he added.
“We have already seen a jump in the price of oil because of the tankers that are anchored in the Red Sea,” Laleh Khalili, professor of international politics at Queen Mary University in London, told NBC News.
Even when rescue efforts are successful, “the buildup of ships can take a week or more to clear,” she added.
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At least 150 other tankers have been waiting to pass through the narrow channel since the 400-meter-long Ever Given ship was stuck on its side on Tuesday morning, stranded after gusts of 30 knots caused it the ship deviated from its course.
The Suez Canal generally allows 50 cargo ships to pass daily between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, providing a vital commercial corridor between Europe and Asia.
Photos released by the Suez authorities showed an excavator removing dirt and rock from the canal’s edge and around the bow of the ship.
“They would try to remove anything that was easy to remove, but the place where they are stuck is not close to a port, in fact it is quite far from anything,” Professor Jasper Graham-Jones, mechanical naval engineer at Plymouth University told Sky News .
“This is where the clear option is a lot of tugs and excavations on the sides.”
(Sky News is owned by Comcast, the parent company of NBC News.)
Evergreen said he “prompted the shipowner to investigate” the source of the accident.
The ship’s owners apologized on Thursday for stopping maritime congestion.
“We sincerely regret that this accident caused great concern to ships that were sailing or should be sailing on the Suez Canal,” said Japanese company Shoei Kisen Kaisha Ltd.
Nearly 19,000 vessels with a net tonnage of 1.17 billion metric tons passed through the canal last year, according to the Suez Canal Authority.
Traffic jams are rare. In 2017, a Japanese container ship blocked the channel, but Egyptian authorities floated the ship again in a few hours.
“In the long run, this delay may force you to rethink the size of ships,” said Khalili, of Queen Mary University. “And if there are issues associated with who will take responsibility for the accident … it could force a reckoning on shipping ownership structures.”
Suez is still remembered for being at the center of an international crisis in 1956, after Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nassar nationalized the channel, which was previously British and French property. The change led to an invasion that resulted in humiliation for the powers of Western Europe.
Charlene Gubash and Olivier Fabre contributed.