When container ship Ever Dado ran aground on the Suez Canal on Tuesday, its volume blocking ship traffic through the main global route, the world looked on, wondering how the authorities would manage to untie the giant.
Days later, the ship is still stuck, amid a frantic effort to free it and fears about the cascading costs of radioactive fallout. Navigation analysts estimate that congestion has already held nearly $ 10 billion in daily transactions.
Some experts were more hopeful on Saturday after the ship’s rudder was released Friday night, according to a spokeswoman for the Suez Canal Economic Zone. Although the ship’s rudder has started to move and the tugs are working at full strength, the ship has not yet been refluxed, Hend Fathy Hussein, the spokeswoman said in a Facebook post.
The chairman of Shoei Kisen, the Japanese company that owns the ship, said he plans to release the ship by Saturday night, according to Reuters.
But on Saturday morning, with a rescue team and channel officials still struggling to dislodge the leviathan from four football fields, global supply chains were another day closer to a total crisis.
Ships loaded with the world’s products – including cars, oil, livestock and laptops – typically flow easily through the waterway, fueling much of the globe as they cross the fastest route from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and the East Coast of the United States States.
“Look around you – 90 percent of what’s in the room came from China,” said Alan Murphy, the founder of Sea-Intelligence, a maritime data and analytics company. “The entire global retail trade moves in containers, or 90% of them. So, everything is impacted. Name any brand and they will be trapped in one of these boats. “
The reduction of the bottleneck depends on the rescuers’ ability to clean the sand and mud at both ends of the ship and possibly lighten their load enough to help it float again, while the tugboats try to push and pull it. out. 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 ship’s technical manager, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, said that larger tugs arrived to help, with two others due on Sunday. Several dredgers were digging around the bow of the vessel, and high-capacity pumps will pump water from the vessel’s ballast tanks to make the ship lighter, the company said.
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 rescue operations.
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 inspecting the hull and found no 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 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.
Maritime transport experts said the wind may well have been the main factor why the ship was trapped in the canal, 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. “
An armada of tugs, their engines spinning with the combined power of tens of thousands of horses, has been pushing and pulling the Semper Dado for days.
Cranes, looking like toys in the shadow of the huge cargo ship, have been excavating mountains of dirt from the area around where the ship’s bow and stern are securely attached.
But with the ship extending some 1,300 feet in length – approximately the height of the Empire State Building – and weighing around 200,000 metric tons, on Saturday morning they still had not been able to dislodge the ship.
Peter Berdowski, chief executive of Royal Boskalis Westminster, one of the companies appointed by the owner of Ever Given to help move the ship, told Dutch news program Nieuwsuur on Wednesday that the operation to free the ship could take “days, even weeks. “
Berdowski, whose company was involved in the expansion of the Suez Canal, said Ever Given was trapped on both shallow sides of the V-shaped channel. Fully loaded with 20,000 containers, the ship “is a very heavy stranded whale,” he said. .
Authorities first tried to float the ship using tugs, a tactic that worked to free CSCL Indian Ocean, a similarly sized container ship that was stuck on the Elbe in 2016, near the port of Hamburg, Germany.
Mr Berdowski said that Ever Given, operated by the Evergreen company, was too heavy for tugboats alone and that, therefore, dredging equipment was being used to move the land around the ship.
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 turquoise water’s edge near the ship’s bow on Friday.
While the dredgers worked, a team of eight Dutch rescue specialists and naval architects overseeing the operation were inspecting the ship and the seabed and creating a computer model to help you get around the ship without damaging it, said the captain Nick Sloane, a South African rescue master who led the operation to fix the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that sank in 2012 off the coast of Italy.
If tugs, dredgers and pumps fail to get the job done, they can be accompanied by a series of specialized ships and machines that require perhaps hundreds of workers: small oil tankers to extract fuel from the ship, the tallest cranes in the world to unload some of their containers one by one, and if there are no cranes tall or close enough, heavy helicopters can load containers of up to 20 tonnes – 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.
All this because, simply: “This is a very big ship. This is a very big problem, ”said Richard Meade, editor-in-chief of Lloyd’s List, a London-based maritime intelligence publication.
“I don’t think there is any doubt that they have everything they need,” he said. “It is just a matter of, it is a very big problem.”
With each day that the Ever Given container ship remains trapped in the Suez Canal, the cost of the outage becomes more significant.
After days of failed efforts to move the gigantic ship, shipowners began to redirect ships bound for the Suez Canal around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, adding weeks to their voyages and burning additional fuel – a cost finally borne by consumers.
When deciding whether to diversion, a shipping company should consider the cost of sitting outside the channel for days compared to the additional time spent sailing through Africa. It is not an easy choice.
“It’s like choosing the post office line – it’s never the right decision,” said Alex Booth, head of research at Kpler, a company that monitors oil transportation.
Seven giant transporters of liquefied natural gas appear to have changed course away from the channel, according to Kpler.
Container ships are also changing their plans. HMM, a Korean shipping company, ordered one of its ships sailing to Asia from Britain via the canal to bypass Africa, according to Noh Ji-hwan, a spokesman for the company.
As workers rush to clear the vital commercial artery, industry leaders are trying to find out how big the impact can be if the crisis extends from days to weeks.
Two weeks can disrupt up to a quarter of the supply of containers that would normally be in European ports, estimated Christian Roeloffs, the executive director of xChange, a shipping consultant in Hamburg, Germany.
“Considering the current shortage of containers, this only increases the response time of ships,” said Roeloffs.
Three-quarters of all container ships traveling from Asia to Europe arrived in late February, according to Sea-Intelligence, a research firm in Copenhagen. Even a few days of turmoil in Suez can make this worse.
If Suez remains clogged for more than a few days, the stakes will rise dramatically. Ships now trapped in the canal will find it difficult to turn around and follow other routes due to the narrowness of the canal.
Whenever ships move across the canal again, they are likely to reach the busy ports at once, forcing many to wait before they can unload – an additional delay.
“It could make a really bad crisis even worse,” said Alan Murphy, the founder of Sea-Intelligence.