TThe problem started at 5:17 am. Ever Dado, an Ultra Large Container Vessel (ULCV) loaded with 20,000 containers, had launched the Suez Canal a quarter of an hour before the south, in Suez Bay.
This is how the channel works: the ships dock the night before and wait to leave the next morning – a train heading south from Port Said starting at 3:30 am, the other heading north at 5am. They meet at the Great Yellow Lake, where the train heading south anchors to let the other pass. Consider a country road with crossing points, only for ships as tall as buildings, traveling at the speed of a scooter.
There are trains because, for most of its 120 miles, the channel is narrow. A two-way system was built at great expense by Egypt in 2015, shortening the train’s transit south to 11 hours. But it only travels 22 miles. For the rest of the passage, ships must travel in a single line along a very narrow route.
Ever Dado was big and she was heavy. As is normal in global shipping, its usual route was to head east to pick up goods in Asia and then return loaded. It was also wide, with a “beam” – or width – of 194 feet and its underwater depth was 51 feet. ULCV is a specification given to a ship with a capacity greater than 20,000 equivalent units of twenty feet. Suez regulations require special permission for ships the size of Ever Given, but she has just been qualified as Suezmax: the maximum dimensions allowed for transporting transit on the canal.
The weather was not calm. Not only was there a 30 mph wind coming from the port room – the rear left – but there was also a sandstorm. Ever Give left its port and left at 8 knots. When I passed through Suez on a container ship in 2010, I remember that it felt like a hike. It was also boring: green water, sand, some housing here and there. After a few hours, I understood why the crew despised him as “a ditch in the desert”. Even the laconic first official was led to express an opinion: “Sand, sand, sand”. Mishap seems impossible, I told the captain at the time, while we were on the bridge while the pilot was napping. “Wrong,” he said.
Once, he recalled, he was leaving the container terminal to enter the canal when the pilot stranded the ship on the sand. The captain intervened canceling the pilot, took the ship off the bank and took a well-deserved break. “When I came back, I said, ‘Where’s the damn pilot?'” Then I saw his head pop up. He was on deck, praying. “
Suez may seem serene, but navigating large ships in shallow channels can be tricky. The ships receive on board a “Suez pilot” and a “Suez crew”, who are bound by their local knowledge. It is well known that these officers must be “lubricated” with Marlboro boxes and treats from the bond depot (the ship distribution store), leading to another Suez nickname for the crew: the Marlboro Canal. “I don’t think the Egyptians could have built the pyramids,” a senior engineer once told me. “They couldn’t: they didn’t have Marlboro back then.”
This is offensive to Egyptians who believe that the canal is a source of great national pride, but on my trip I saw the Suez pilot eat the entire lunch menu and then doze off – on the couch, in the captain’s chair, watching officer’s chair. The second officer had to wake him up for instructions.
We don’t know what the pilot was doing the morning the Semper Dado left, carrying almost three times as many boxes as the ship I traveled on – but we do know that 5:17 am is when the ship first moved towards the port side. The trajectory, however, has been corrected. For the next 25 minutes (as seen in this simulation, based on satellite data), the ship accelerated to more than 13 knots. One explanation for this would have been to deal with the wind better.
Around 5:42 am, something was clearly wrong. The ship rocked to port, then starboard, port again, starboard again, until finally the bow suddenly turned to starboard and crashed into Asia. Since the ship was longer than the width of the channel, it was stuck.
There she stayed for six days, closing a road that transports more than 10% of global shipping every day, in a sector that transports 90% of global trade. Suddenly, the general public realized that ships were very important, after all, and that almost nothing travels by plane.
Other ships had problems at Suez. OOCL Japan lost its direction in 2017 and nailed it; destroyed some road and a passing car and was freed in several hours. In 2004, the Russian oil tanker Tropic Brilliance closed the canal for 3 days and was similarly stuck after mechanical problems.
In the beginning, the prevailing theory given to Ever Given’s situation by Ten Gen Osama Rabie, head of the Suez Canal Authority, was “strong winds and a sandstorm”. By Saturday, Rabie’s vision had changed. Now, the weather can be involved, but it can also be “technical error or human error”.
I shook my head at that, thinking about that pilot napping and making assumptions. Most maritime accidents involve human error – “before, during or after” a disaster, in the words of a retired senior captain.
No other ship changed direction, although they were affected by the same wind and were sailing in the same waters as the channel. The ship ahead, Cosco Galaxy, was as big as Ever Dado, but nothing happened to it. The other 19 ships on the convoy continued without incident, except that they almost collided with each other: it takes about a mile to come to a complete stop.
It is possible that the sandstorm caused poor visibility – but ships operate at night using radar: they do not need to see clearly. The huge container wall could have acted like a sail when the wind picked up, taking it off course. Could the pilot have compensated for the wind?
Or perhaps the crew did not react quickly enough to the events because they were almost certainly exhausted. Not only does the Suez convoy start early, but life on a container ship – with its routine, isolation and four-hour watchmen, three times a day – can be exhausting. During my transit, the second officer slept three hours a night for the previous three nights and did not sleep the night before the train. Furthermore, in the pandemic, many of the world’s 1.5 million seafarers were unable to land for months. Exhaustion is widespread.
Then there is the water. The channels may seem calm, but their water can do strange things on large ships, causing complex hydrodynamics that can create suction, pulling a ship towards shore or tilting its bow. A “squat effect” can happen because, unlike the sea, the water in a channel has to stay still: it heaps under the ship, the flow accelerates under the hull and the pressure decreases, sucking the hull into the vacuum.
The squat happens when the bow is raised and the rear sinks. If a ship gets too close to a bank, a “margin effect” can be established, with hydrodynamics just as dangerous: speed, pressure and suction pull the ship off course and can make it spin. Overcorrection with the rudder can make things worse. The bank’s effect is so complicated, entire PhDs were done on it. The bigger the ship, the more powerful the suction.
“It always comes down to two things,” says Dr. Sal Mercogliano, a maritime historian at Campbell University in North Carolina. “Mechanical, or human. Even if it is the wind and the climate, this is human because, once again, we have the ability to detect the wind. If they knew that strong winds were a potential that morning, why bring the ship to the channel? “
Two investigations are already underway. Ever Dado is owned by a Japanese company, operated by a Taiwanese company, manned by Indians, but has the flag of Panama, because that is how maritime transport works: ships can rent a flag at the flag offices and Panama is the biggest in the world. According to the International Maritime Organization’s safety investigation rules, Panama does the safety investigation, although the ship has been trapped in Egyptian waters. Panama’s investigation will not cover the culprit, but Egypt has already initiated an investigation into “the navigability of the vessel and the actions of the crew”.
“I suspect,” says Guy Platten, secretary general of the International Navigation Chamber, “that we will find out that it was a complex series of events.” An ever-increasing chain of misfortunes. If the cause is considered human or mechanical, and not an act of God or force majeure, insurers will be responsible for stunning damage. “There will be many accusations,” says Mercogliano. A preliminary report from Panama already blamed the mechanical failure. Meanwhile, owners Shoei Kisen Kaisha have already filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of England against Evergreen operators.
We always need someone to blame, and it’s always easier to trap a human than the wind. The criminalization of seafarers as a result of large vessels is of concern to the International Navigation Chamber and other maritime associations. In 2007, Hebei Spirit, which carried 250,000 tonnes of crude oil, was rammed by a Samsung Heavy Industries barge while it was anchored near Daesan, South Korea, causing serious oil pollution. Captain Jasprit Chawla blew his whistle five times and tried to call the barge – but Chawla and his first officer were arrested for 18 months. Imagine this in another transportation situation: you are sitting in a parked car, you are hit by a car and you go to prison.
In a way, Ever Given’s grounding was the best scenario for a major maritime disaster, in addition to the expensive hiccup for smooth sailing of global trade. Nobody was hurt; nothing has been polluted. The ship’s speed of release – six days – can be a source of pride for the Egyptians, with their brave tugs and tireless excavators, although the wisdom of sending a ship that hit a bank at high speed through the canal using its own engine , most marine safety experts would scratch their heads. It provoked a useful debate about what could make Suez safer: should ships be escorted by tugs, even though Egypt does not have enough to share between trains? Should ships reduce their size to more manageable proportions?
“This incident,” said Platten in a statement, “has highlighted the importance of global shipping for daily life and the delicate nature of the global supply chain it supports.” Will we, with our insatiable desire for consumer goods, which is why these gigantic ships exist, question whether the price of what we receive is worth the cost? “It takes 1,500 people and Jack’s death on the Titanic so that we can put more lifeboats on the ships,” says Mercogliano. “Maritime laws are written in blood.”