More than 100 cargo-laden ships, including oil, car parts and consumer goods remain at the Suez canal while tugs and scrapers raced to block a free carrier from one of the major world trade articles.
The 220,000-tonne, 400-meter-long donated vessel, one of a new type of large vessel called “megaships”, entered near the southern end of the canal on Tuesday morning. The Suez Canal Authority (SCA) said the ship, which is operated by Evergreen Marine in Taiwan, lost its ability to navigate amid high winds and a dust storm.
GAC, a Dubai-based maritime services company, said the ship had been partially refurbished and moved alongside the canal bank ahead of local time on Wednesday afternoon, citing information from the canal authority. “Convoys and traffic are expected to start as soon as the vessel is towed to another position,” it said on its website.
Banked traffic on both sides of the lane, vital to Asia-Europe trade, with about 50 vessels per day passing in 2019, representing nearly a third of the world’s ship traffic .
About 30 boats were waiting at Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake halfway through the canal, and 40 were resting in the Mediterranean near Port Said and another 30 at Suez in the Red Sea, according to canal service provider Half Agencies. Old sections of the canal were reopened in an effort to reduce congestion.
Analysts were predicting a break in traffic even if the Ever Given was released immediately. “Once the barrier is cleared, ships will race to make up for the lost time and that could be a concern for the arriving ports,” said Peter Sand, the chief shipping analyst with Bimco, an international association for shipowners.
Ranjith Raja, of financial data company Refinitiv, said: “We have never seen anything like this but the resulting congestion is likely to take several days to weeks to clear. It is expected to have a significant impact on the convoys, records and other global markets. “
He said 27 of the vessels marked waiting on either side of the Ever Given were carrying about 1.9m metric tonnes of oil.
The boat broker Braemar told Agence France-Presse that if the tugs could not move the vessel, some vessels may have to be towed by a mast galley to unload the vessel, and “ This can take days, maybe weeks ”.
Photographs taken from another boat in the canal, the Maersk Denver, showed the Ever Given which was installed at an angle across the canal. Julianne Cona, who posted a picture on Instagram, watched the drama unfold while her ship waited at anchor. “They had a handful of tubs trying to pull and push him earlier but he wasn’t going anywhere,” she wrote.
The boat landed in the canal at around 0540 GMT on Tuesday, has been moving at 15mph. The entire crew was safe and reported and there were no reports of injuries or contamination, the ship’s technical manager, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement (BSM) said.
Jamil Sayegh, a captain and maritime law expert with experience of navigating the canal, said the crash was partly due to strong winds that turned the ships above deck into a high-swollen sail. the vessel off course.
“The force generated by the wind would have changed abnormally at the stern of the ship,” said Sayegh, but added that human error may also have been the cause of vessels crossing the canal. in convoys and none of the ships behind the Ever Given ran into a similar problem.
“Vessels are vessels powered by moving engines with rudders that are almost identical in all vessels. The on-board variables are the software and the staff. “It is the duty of ships passing through the Suez to use Egyptian pilots to assist them in navigating the piece, he said.
Weather forecasts would have shown strong winds on Tuesday – Egyptian forecasters said high winds and a sandstorm had hit the area, with winds raining as high as 31mph – but Sayegh said canal authorities and sailors tried to delay travel.
“If you delay this ship at Suez harbor, you are forcing the owner of the ship to lose $ 60,000. [£44,000] per day or $ 3-4,000 per hour of delay, ”said Sayegh, the Beirut representative for Lloyd’s shipping magazine.
The Ever Given, one of a new category of ultra-large spacecraft (ULCS), some of which are oversized for the Panama Canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, was carrying hundreds of attached vessels for Rotterdam from China.
Analysts said the incentive not to stop trips had intensified with the rise in supply chains just in time. “For decades shipping has been an invisible conveyor belt at sea, allowing large manufacturing industries such as automation to carry loads just in time, even if occasional catchers a false claim to the reliability of the program, “said shipping analyst Sand.
Holger Loesch, deputy general director of the German Federation of Industries, said the impediment was exacerbated by an already “tight situation in international shipping”.
Camille Egloff, a maritime transport expert at Boston Consulting Group, warned of “domino effects in European ports in the coming days”.
The Suez Canal is one of the most important waterways in the world, connecting the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea and moving roads to Asia. It is 120 miles (190km) long, 24 meters (79 feet) deep and 205 meters wide and can handle dozens of large vessels every day. It was extended in 2015 to allow vessels to move across all sides at the same time, but only in part of the waterway.
Because of its role as a cornerstone of international trade, especially in oil, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi described the expansion as a “gift to the world”. It cost $ 8bn (£ 5.2bn at the time) after the Egyptian dictator called for the project to be completed within a year.
Egypt welcomed world leaders to a grand ceremony marking the opening of the new canal channel amid a wave of national excitement about the project.
Vessels have previously been laid down in the canal. In 2017 a Japanese ship capsized but was returned within hours. Away from the waterway, a more dangerous incident occurred near the German port of Hamburg in 2016 when a large CSCL Indian Ocean landed and required 12 thatches to be released after five days.