“If there’s wind from the beam, or the side of the vessel, and you have a lack of steering control, it’s very easy for the ship to be turned sideways.” Why Is the Suez Canal So Important?
“It’s basically a huge wall,” Steven Browne, the Department Chair of Marine Transportation and International Business and logistics at the Cal Maritime, tells Pop Mech. “The scale has gotten so big that a lot of the infrastructure has yet to catch up with the size of the ship,” McManus says.Īdverse weather conditions only exacerbate these challenges. The push to build increasingly larger ships may partially be to blame for the Ever Given’s precarious situation. It can carry as many as 20,000 20-foot-long shipping containers. The gargantuan Ever Given, which the shipping company Evergreen Marine built in 2018, is a Golden-class container ship. With a ship as big as the Ever Given, the effort could take weeks. “In the middle of the Suez Canal, there’s no infrastructure for that, so that would mean getting a crane barge alongside and then taking those boxes off one at a time,” says McManus. Another option would be to unload the ship’s cargo, but that could prove difficult without the necessary equipment readily available. That solution, however, could destabilize the ship, Captain Morgan McManus, Master, Empire State VI, of SUNY Maritime College, tells Pop Mech. One way to do that is to empty the ballast tanks. So, now what? The key to “unstucking” the Ever Given will be lightening the ship’s load. Visibility plummeted and wind gusts reached speeds of up to 31 miles per hour. The Ever Given, which is owned by the Japanese company Shoei Kisen Kaisha, was on its way to the port of Rotterdam from China when it became stuck after a sandstorm blew through the region. If the Panamanian-flagged ship isn’t freed soon, it could spell disaster for a global shipping industry already hobbled by the effects of COVID-19. “That accident shuts down all lanes of travel, and everything will then start to back up.” “It’s just like having an accident on the interstate,” Donald Maier, the Dean for the School of Maritime Transportation, Logistics, and Management at the Cal Maritime, tells Pop Mech.
Two days later, more than 100 container ships are still waiting at each end of the canal as tug boats and dredgers struggle to free the Ever Given, which weighs 200,000 metric tons and stretches 1,300 feet long. It marks the end of an agonizing week for the maritime trade industry-one that saw losses as high as $10 billion per day, highlighted the frailty of an already strained global supply chain, and spurred a slew of incredible memes.Ī colossal container ship that ran aground in the Suez Canal on Tuesday has ensnarled one of the world's busiest shipping lanes in a marine traffic jam. Now that the ship is under way-thanks to high tides and a fleet of tug boats and dredgers-hundreds of vessels that have been stranded on either side of the canal are gearing up to resume their journey along the vital shipping corridor. ET : After 6 grueling days, crews have managed to wrench the Ever Given free from its perch in the Suez Canal.