The Suez Canal, one of the most important shipping lanes in the world, has been blocked because someone accidentally got stuck with their giant container ship.
FYI: the shipping company is called Evergreen and the ship is called the Ever Given
24 March 2021 — The Suez Canal, one of the most important shipping lanes in the world, has bee blocked because someone accidentally got stuck with their giant container ship. The photos are unreal. I’ve been tracking it on my Marine Traffic app:
And a traffic jam is building:
The ship — which at 400 meters is almost as long as the Empire State Building is tall — is wedged across the vital trade passage at the canal’s 151-kilometer (94-mile) mark, the vessel’s operating company said in a statement. The container ship entered the crucial East-West trade route on Tuesday morning and ran into trouble when it was approximately 6 nautical miles from the southern end of the estuary. It lost all power, massive winds hit the ship and the crew couldn’t steer clear on time. The emergency tugboats were unable to get to the ship in time to prevent it sliding.
At present, eight tugboats sent to free the ship have not been able to budge her. So I suspect we’ll see some old-fashioned remedy: secure the foreground ship to the pier, and use its anchor windlass to pull on the stern of the Ever Given – and get a Mi-26 to manually offload light containers on the bow or get a mobile crane erected quickly to do the same. It will be a long process.
Side note: how do you measure the magnitude of the costs associated with this delay? How many millions of dollars worth of goods are held up with the traffic jam?
According to my handy-dandy Port and Terminal Guide 2018, the Suez Canal accounts for approximately 30% of container ship traffic globally each day, with the alternative shipping route between Asia and Europe — navigating around the African cape — taking a week longer. Nearly 19,000 ships, or an average of 51.5 ships per day, with a net tonnage of 1.17 billion tonnes passed through the canal during 2020, according to the Suez Canal Authority.
Re-floating the massive container vessel is “technically very complicated” and could take days. The equipment to float a ship is available but it depends on how it is used. If the method is not done correctly it might take a week, and if it’s done well it might take two days.
But what happened should not have happened and there is a lot of stuff at work here:
• poor communication from the ship to the Suez authorities. I suspect the bridge and engine room were all staffed with cheap labor. This is what flags of convenience have done to the shipping industry.
• the Suez authorities did not have the emergency tugs dispersed along the canal but at each end
• apart from the ship’s crew/officers there are usually local pilots onboard during the transit. It’s unclear what was happening on the bridge
• the Canal is pretty narrow and container ships are growing larger by the year, and the Ever Again is a doozy. Round the Cape next time, Captain?
And how hard is it to point a massive ship in the proper direction and not towards the shore? Well, long story but it is called the “bank effect” which refers to the tendency of the stern of a ship to swing toward the near bank when operating in a river or constricted waterway. From my NauticEd bible :
The asymmetric flow around a ship induced by the vicinity of banks causes pressure differences (Bernoulli’s principle) between port and starboard sides. As a result, a lateral force will act on the ship, mostly directed towards the closest bank, as well as a yawing moment pushing her bow towards the centre of the waterway. The squat effect increases due to the decreased blockage. This phenomenon depends on many parameters, such as bank shape, water depth, ship-bank distance, ship properties, ship speed and propeller action.
A reliable estimation of bank effects is important for determining the limiting conditions in which a ship can safely navigate a waterway. This phenomenon has several different names, including bank suction, bank cushion, stern suction, and ship-bank interaction.