Officials planning further attempts to free a massive ship trapped in the Suez Canal

A giant container ship remained stuck sideways in Egypt’s Suez Canal for the fifth day on Saturday (local time), as authorities prepared to make further attempts to free the ship and reopen a crucial east-west waterway for the world shipping.

The Ever Given, a Panama-flagged ship that carries cargo between Asia and Europe, ran aground Tuesday in the narrow canal that runs between Africa and the Sinai Peninsula.

The huge vessel got stuck in a single-lane stretch of the canal, about 6 km north of the southern entrance, near the city of Suez.

At a news conference on Saturday in Suez, the head of the canal authority, Lieutenant General Osama Rabei, told reporters that they could not establish a set timetable for when the ship could be evicted. He said he was hopeful that a dredging operation could free the ship without resorting to lightening it by removing its cargo.

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“It’s hard to deal with him easily,” he said.

A maritime traffic jam grew to around 321 vessels near Port Said on the Mediterranean Sea, Port Suez on the Red Sea and in the canal system in Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake, according to Rabei.

Peter Berdowski, CEO of Boskalis, the salvage company contracted to extract Ever Given, said the company expected to release the container ship in a few days using a combination of heavy tugs, dredging and high tides.

He told the Dutch current affairs program News hour Friday night that the front of the boat is stuck in sandy clay, but the rear “has not been completely pushed into the clay and that is positive because you can use the rear to free it.”

Berdowski said two large tugs were heading to the canal and are expected to arrive over the weekend. He said the company aims to harness the power of tugs, dredging and tides, which it said are expected to be up to 50 centimeters higher on Saturday.

“The combination of the (tugs) that we will have there, more dredged ground and high tide, we hope it will be enough to release the ship somewhere early next week,” he said.

If that doesn’t work, the company will remove hundreds of containers from the front of the ship to lighten it, effectively lifting the ship so it is easier to release, Berdowski said.

A crane that can lift the containers off the ship was already on the way, he said.

The salvage mission focused on the ship’s lodged bow, after some progress was made to free the ship’s stern, channel service provider Leth Agencies said on Saturday.

Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly called the ship’s situation “a very extraordinary incident” in his first public comments on the blockade.

Shoei Kisen, the company that owns the giant container ship, said the company was considering removing the containers to lighten the vessel if other refloating efforts fail.

The White House said it has offered to help Egypt reopen the canal. “We have equipment and capacity that most countries do not have and we are looking at what we can do and what help we can provide,” US President Joe Biden told reporters on Friday.

An initial investigation showed the vessel ran aground due to high winds and ruled out a mechanical or engine failure, the company and the canal authority said. GAC, a global transportation and logistics company, had previously said the ship had experienced a power outage, but did not elaborate.

Rabei, the head of the canal authority, said the winds were one of the factors, but “not the only cause” of the incident. He said an investigation was underway into the cause of the grounding, but did not rule out human or technical error.

Some vessels began to change course and dozens of vessels were still en route to the waterway, according to data firm Refinitiv.

A prolonged closure of the crucial waterway would cause delays in the global shipping chain. Some 19,000 vessels passed through the canal last year, according to official figures. About 10 percent of world trade flows through the canal. The shutdown could affect oil and gas shipments to Europe from the Middle East.

It was not clear how long the blockade would last. Even after reopening the channel linking factories in Asia to consumers in Europe, the containers on hold are likely to arrive in busy ports, forcing them to face additional delays before unloading.

Apparently anticipating long delays, the owners of the stuck ship diverted a sister ship, the Ever Greet, on a course around Africa, according to satellite data.

Others are following suit. Liquefied natural gas carrier Pan Americas changed course in the mid-Atlantic, now pointing south to circle the southern tip of Africa, according to satellite data from MarineTraffic.com.