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The images of the huge container ship Ever Given stranded at the mouth of the Suez Canal were by far the most viewed and talked about of the week, going from witnessing a spectacular and unexpected event to the background of memes shared on social networks. They revealed to many people the mechanisms and dimensions of the infrastructure of naval expeditions, so fundamental and influential in the daily lives of each of us as invisible to practically anyone who does not have to deal with it for work reasons.
At the same time, the Ever Given incident was a reminder of how relatively trivial and unpredictable unforeseen events can have enormous consequences for the world economy: if the ship is not released within a few days, the impact on trade will likely have consequences that can be directly perceived by millions of people. But there is probably more behind the collective attention to the ship and its huge unexpected, which fascinates many for its randomness, its aesthetics, its comic side and its nature for once oblivious to the epidemiological news they have. year.
(Mahmoud Khaled / Getty Images)
After months in which to follow and understand the news about the pandemic has required the development of a considerable dose of scientific knowledge about viruses and vaccines, and in general in a historical era in which the causes, ramifications and implications of most of Global phenomena Seemingly, and often are, too complex to be fully interpreted and evaluated, the Ever Given story is captivating many people with its simplicity. For reasons still to be clarified but generally intuitive, probably linked to a combination of atmospheric factors (strong wind), environmental (the shape of the channel in that section) and human (some type of maneuvering error is hypothesized), a huge ship got stuck where it shouldn’t have gotten stuck. And moving it is a very complicated undertaking.
– Read also: The history of the Suez Canal
“People like you and I shouldn’t really know what ships like that do,” he wrote in theAtalntic Amanda Mull. “You are not expected to think, or even notice, global maritime trade: but Ever Given, in cartoon mode, has made evident a crucial piece of global capital infrastructure, normally invisible in people’s daily lives. He did it with an absolutely sublime visual joke, enhanced with every new detail about the problems the ship is causing and with every photo of the helpless human actions taken to resolve the situation.
(Suez Canal Authority via AP)
The operations to liberate the ship, coordinated by a specialized Dutch team that had previously recovered the Russian submarine K-141 Kursk from the bottom of the Barents Sea, are progressing slowly and are revealing a certain impotence of the equipment and techniques available to deal with them. similar accidents. The photos of the lone excavator next to Ever Given’s massive hull were partly misleading: Dredgers are currently at work draining the seabed and towing vessels to pull the ship, and huge cranes may soon step in to move containers to lighten the load. load. Somehow, the international focus on such a specific and unusual engineering puzzle is reminiscent of the operations to extract the children trapped in the Thai cave in 2018.
In recent days, many have followed Ever Given events on sites like Boat finder OR Maritime traffic, which show the positions of all ships of a certain size in the world’s seas and oceans, in a particularly satisfying way for fans of maps and geography. Despite the rather isolated location of the incident, as the days passed, newspapers and international news agencies published spectacular photos of the ship, gigantic compared to the bulldozers, boats and houses at its feet. Had it not taken an unexpected tilt, for the inhabitants of the towns and villages along the Canal, the profile of Ever Given would have been one of many that placidly passes on the horizon every day.
The proportions of the ship and the bottom of the Egyptian desert, interrupted by the chromatic patterns of the containers, made the Ever Given photos somehow hypnotic, halfway between an imperial cruise ship stranded on a planet of Star Wars and the ship dragged into the Amazon rainforest of Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog. The absence of dead, injured or even obvious victims of the accident – which could emerge more clearly if the blockade continues and damages certain sectors of the economy – has probably made the comic reinterpretation of the accident more cheerful in the many memes that circulate online.
«Ever Given stands on its side on one of the most important shopping streets in the world yelling ‘Ooops! “. It is ruining everything, and at least for the moment it cannot be stopped (or rather: it cannot be set in motion), ”Mull writes.
(EPA / SUEZ CHANNEL AUTHORITY)
Cargo ships are a huge, fundamental, and indeed mysterious sector, recounted by journalist William Langewiesche in a 2004 book: Terror of the sea. Between unfulfilled predictions about the terrorist threat posed by large ships and reconstructions of vintage naval accidents, Langewiesche recounts the intricate and lawless world of shipping, made up of substantially untraceable ships and complex and fraudulent transnational registration systems, What are they doing? Efforts by governments and international institutions to establish and above all to enforce complicated and ineffective rules.
Research firm Alphaliner estimates that there are approximately 5,500 active large container ships, for a total capacity of more than 24 million TEU, the unit corresponding to a 6.1 x 2.4 x 2.6 meter container considered the standard in the world. Marine transport. The maximum capacity of a container of this size is 24 tons, although they are normally loaded much less. Containerization is a relatively recent phenomenon, born in the 1950s but developed especially since the 1980s, which has revolutionized international trade and contributed significantly to the construction of a truly global market, making it drastically cheaper to move goods from the end of the world. world.
However, the Ever Given is not just any container ship, but one of the largest in circulation. 400 meters long, longer than the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower, and weighing more than 200,000 tons, it can hold about 20,000 shipping containers. It has a capacity greater than that of the entire commercial fleet of the British Empire at the end of the 16th century, estimated by the historian Yuval Noah Harari at about 68 thousand tons. The British sailors who made British world trade possible at that time numbered 16,000: the crew of the Ever Given is less than thirty people.
The Port of Oakland, California. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
“Look around you: 90 percent of what is in your room comes from China,” he told al New York Times Alan Murphy, founder of the marine analysis company Sea-Intelligence. “At least 90 percent of the world’s commercial traffic moves in containers, so everything is involved. Say any brand and you’ll be stuck on one of those boats “waiting to cross the Suez Canal.”
– Read also: How the Suez Canal is made
Much of what we buy online is transported on a container ship such as the Ever Given, and for those who live in Italy, France or the United Kingdom, a considerable part of the objects of daily use pass through the Suez Canal, the main communication route. . shipping route between Asia and Europe. But the accident does not reveal only this mechanism, which is not normally thought or at least taken for granted.
Peter S. Goodman, business journalist for the New York Times, explained that among the many and enormous consequences of containerization, ranging from relocation of production to reducing costs for consumers, there is also the fact that companies have begun to rely on fast and efficient international shipping chains to save on stock of materials and components. As Goodman explains:
Rather than spending large sums to accumulate goods, businesses can rely on the magic of the internet and the global shipping industry to order and get what they want in a timely manner when they want it. Money that is not spent on stocking warehouses with unnecessary auto parts can be distributed as dividends to shareholders.
This system, made possible by impressive logistics optimization models that have allowed to contain costs and significantly increase profits, has magnified a certain fragility of the globalized market that consumers usually only notice sporadically, in correspondence with particular deficiencies of specific products . The difficulties of governments to find masks and medical devices during the first wave of the pandemic highlighted these weaknesses in the system, normally used to the immediate and unlimited availability of goods. The Ever Given, with the keel wedged sideways in a few tens of thousands of cubic meters of mud, could do the same.
(Planet Labs Inc. via AP)
To understand the scope of the consequences of the canal blockade, it will be necessary to know how long it will take to move Ever Given. Shipping is used to dealing with the unexpected, from bad weather to mechanical breakdowns, and the expert opinion is that if the situation is resolved early next week, the damage will be contained. But about 12 percent of world trade passes through the Suez Canal, according to the agency. Lloyd’s List the lockdown involves the equivalent of $ 9.6 billion in goods each day. Ships waiting to pass I am more than 320 according to the agency Leth Agencies, which deals with traffic on the canal, and several companies are deciding or evaluating whether to divert the routes in order to circumnavigate the Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa, a route that may take about ten days in excess and a significant additional expense on fuel.
– Read also: The ships that were trapped for eight years in the Suez Canal
As Ian Goldin, professor of globalization at Oxford, explains, “As we become more and more interdependent, we are even more subject to weaknesses that appear and are always unpredictable. No one could predict that a ship would run aground in the canal, just as no one could predict where the pandemic would come from. Just as we cannot predict the next cyber attack, nor the next financial crisis: but we know it will come ».
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