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More than 100 ships laden with cargo, including oil, auto parts and consumer goods, remain stuck in the Suez Canal as tugs and dredgers scrambled to free an affected container ship blocking one of the world’s key commercial arteries.
The 220,000-ton, 400-meter-long Ever Given, one of a class of huge new vessels labeled “mega-ships,” clogged near the southern end of the canal on Tuesday morning. The Suez Canal Authority (SCA) said it had lost the ability to drive amid high winds and a dust storm.
GAC, a Dubai-based maritime services company, said the ship had been partially refloated and moved alongside the canal on Wednesday afternoon local time, citing information from the canal authority. “Convoys and traffic are expected to resume as soon as the vessel is towed to another position,” it said on its website.
Traffic is piling up on both sides of the lane, key to trade between Asia and Europe, through which around 50 ships passed a day in 2019, accounting for nearly a third of global container ship traffic.
About 30 vessels were waiting in Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake midway along the canal, while 40 were idle in the Mediterranean near Port Said and another 30 in Suez on the Red Sea, according to the canal’s service provider. Leth Agencies. Old sections of the canal have been reopened in an effort to ease congestion.
Analysts predicted traffic disruptions even if the Ever Given were released imminently. “When the blockade is cleared, ships will race to make up for lost time and that could be a problem for ports of arrival,” said Peter Sand, chief shipping analyst at Bimco, an international shipowners’ association.
Ranjith Raja of financial data firm Refinitiv said: “We have never seen anything like this before, but the resulting congestion will likely take several days or weeks to clear. It is expected to have a ripple effect on the other convoys, schedules and global markets. “
He said 27 of the identified ships waiting on either side of the Ever Given were carrying approximately 1.9 million metric tons of oil.
Ship broker Braemar told Agence France-Presse that if the tugs could not move the ship, some containers may need to be removed by a crane barge to lighten the ship, and “this can take days, maybe weeks.”
Images taken from another ship on the canal, the Maersk Denver, showed Ever Given housed at an angle across the canal. Julianne Cona, who posted a photo on Instagram, watched the drama unfold as her ship waited at anchor. “They had a lot of tugs trying to pull and push before but they weren’t going anywhere,” he wrote.
The ship ran aground in the canal around 0540 GMT on Tuesday. having been moving at 15 mph. The entire crew was safe and accounted for and there were no reports of injuries or contamination, said the ship’s technical manager, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement (BSM).
Jamil Sayegh, a former captain and maritime law specialist with experience in navigating the canal, said the accident was likely due in part to high winds that turned the containers on deck into a large sail that diverted the ship’s course. .
“The force generated by the wind would have unintentionally altered the ship’s heading,” Sayegh said, but added that human error may also have been a factor, as the ships traverse the canal in convoys and none of the ships behind the Ever Given he had. have similar problems.
“Ships are engines that run on propulsion engines with almost identical rudders on all ships. The variables on board are the software and the personnel. ”Ships passing through Suez are also required to use Egyptian pilots to help them navigate the leg, he said.
Weather forecasts would have shown the winds were strong on Tuesday (Egyptian meteorologists said strong winds and a sandstorm had hit the area, with gusts of up to 50 km / h), but Sayegh said the canal authorities and the sailors tried not to slow down.
“If you delay this ship at the Suez anchorage, it means that you are causing the shipowner to lose $ 60,000. [£44,000] per day or $ 3-4,000 per hour of delay, ”said Sayegh, the Beirut agent for shipping newspaper Lloyd’s.
The Ever Given, one of a new category of so-called ultra-large container ships (ULCS), some of which are too large for the Panama Canal that links the Atlantic and the Pacific, was carrying hundreds of containers bound for Rotterdam from China.
Analysts said the incentive not to pause travel had been heightened with the rise of just-in-time supply chains. “For decades, shipping has been the invisible conveyor belt at sea, allowing large manufacturing industries, such as automotive, to ship just-in-time, although shippers are criticizing the reliability of the program from time to time.” said shipping analyst Sand.
Holger Loesch, deputy director general of the Federation of German Industries, said the blockade had exacerbated an “already tense situation in international container shipping.”
Camille Egloff, a shipping specialist at Boston Consulting Group, warned of “ripple effects in European ports in the coming days.”
The Suez Canal is one of the most important waterways in the world, linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea and shipping routes to Asia. It is 120 miles (190 km) long, 24 meters (79 feet) deep and 205 meters wide and can handle dozens of giant container ships a day. It was expanded in 2015 to allow ships to transit in both directions simultaneously, but only on part of the waterway.
Its role as a cornerstone of international trade, particularly oil, led Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi to announce the expansion as “a gift to the world.” It cost $ 8bn (£ 5.2bn at the time) after the Egyptian dictator demanded that the project be completed in a year.
Egypt welcomed world leaders to a grand ceremony marking the opening of the canal’s new canal amid a wave of nationalist fervor over the project.
Ships have been stranded in the canal before. In 2017, a Japanese ship got stuck, but was refloated in a matter of hours. Away from the canal, a more serious incident occurred near the German port of Hamburg in 2016 when the massive Indian Ocean CSCL ran aground and required 12 tugs to free it after five days.
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