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Dredging efforts continued on Sunday, according to Ever Given operator Evergreen Marine, and attempts to refloat the vessel will resume at 2 p.m. local time (9 a.m. ET).
Meanwhile, the backlog of ships waiting to transit the vital Egyptian waterway has risen to 327, according to Leth Agencies, the canal’s service provider.
Syria’s Oil and Mineral Resources Ministry said the blockade of the Suez Canal had “hampered oil supplies to Syria and delayed the arrival of a tanker carrying oil and petroleum products to Syria,” state-run SANA News reported.
Amid fuel supply fears, the Middle Eastern nation has been forced to ration “the available quantities of petroleum derivatives, primarily diesel and benzene, to ensure their vital availability for as long as possible,” said the Saturday SANA.
The step has been taken “to ensure the continuous supply of basic services to Syrians such as bakeries, hospitals, water stations, communication centers and other vital institutions,” according to SANA, citing the ministry.
Syria will continue to ration oil supplies until “the return of the normal movement of shipping through the Suez Canal, which may take an unknown time,” he added.
The Ever Given, a massive ship almost as long as the Empire State Building, ran aground in the Egyptian canal on Tuesday after being caught in 40-knot winds and a sandstorm. Authorities are also investigating possible human or technical errors.
The blockade, on what is one of the busiest and most important waterways in the world, could have a major impact on already stretched global supply chains, and the disruption will increase with each passing day.
A team of salvage experts from the Dutch firm SMIT Salvage and the Japanese firm Nippon Salvage, who have worked on several high-profile operations in the past, have been appointed to assist the Suez Canal Authority in launching the ship, the Evergreen Marine rental company. saying.
“Having removed more than 20,000 tons of sand and mud, the ongoing dredging operation has succeeded in loosening the bow of the Ever Given within the shore of the Suez Canal and the stern of the ship has been cleared from the sandbar,” Evergreen said. Marine in an update. Sunday.
“The ship’s rudder and propeller are fully functional and are expected to provide additional support to the tugboats assigned to move the container ship from the accident site so that normal traffic can resume back into the canal.”
At a press conference on Saturday, SCA President Osama Rabie gave details of the rescue operation, which he described as “technically difficult” and “involving many factors.”
“We are facing a difficult and complicated situation, we work on rocky ground, the tides are very high, in addition to the enormous size of the ship and the number of containers that make it difficult,” he said. “We cannot set a specific date for the ship to float, it depends on the ship’s response.”
About 9,000 tonnes of ballast water has been removed from the ship, Rabie said, and the dredging was carried out during low tides while 14 tugs worked during high tides. Rescuers managed to temporarily restart the rudder and propellers Friday night before a low tide halted their efforts, he said.
Two additional heavy tugs are expected to arrive at Ever Given “presumably early in the evening” on Sunday, a spokesperson for Boskalis, a sister company to SMIT Salvage, told CNN.
The pair has a combined pulling capacity of around 400 tonnes, spokesman Martijn Schuttevaer said. Once the tugs arrive, it could take a few hours to connect to Ever Given, he said.
Boskalis’ chief executive said on Friday that he hoped the extra pulling power from those two tugs, combined with dredging, a 16 to 20-inch high tide, and the “lever power” of the ship’s relatively free stern could. be enough to snatch the container ship for free.
A crane that could be used to remove containers from the ship’s bow, if that plan fails, has not yet arrived, according to Boskalis.
On Saturday, Rabie described that scenario, which would lighten the ship’s load, as a laborious and laborious process that “hopefully” they would not have to resort to.
Rabie added that the reasons for the accident remain unclear. “There are many factors or reasons, the fast winds and the sandstorm could have been a reason, but not the main reason, it could have been a technical error or a human error,” he said. “There will be more investigations.”
Meanwhile, billions of dollars in vital cargo and sensitive products are behind on the hundreds of ships whose path is blocked. About a dozen of them transport cattle.
The EU director of the NGO Animals International, Gabriel Paun, warned that thousands of animals transported on the boats, mostly Romanian, could be at risk of dying if the situation is not resolved in the coming days.
CNN’s Magdy Samaan reported from Cairo and Mohammed Tawfeeq from Baghdad, while Laura Smith-Spark wrote from London. CNN’s Mostafa Salem and Mick Krever contributed to this report.
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