When the carrier Ever Given landed in the Suez Canal on Tuesday, most people were blocking shipping traffic through the world’s main route, the world looked at it, wondering how the authorities govern the behemoth.
Days later, the vessel is still stuck, amid a strong attempt to free her, and she fears a drop in containment costs. Already, shipping analysts estimate, traffic has maintained nearly $ 10 billion in daily trade.
Some experts were more optimistic Saturday, after the ship’s ruler was released Friday night, according to a spokesman for the Suez Canal Economic Zone. Although the ship’s ruler had begun to maneuver with tugs operating at full force, the ship had not yet been refurbished, the spokeswoman Hend Fathy Hussein said in a Facebook post.
The president of Shoei Kisen, the Japanese company that owns the ship, said they were aiming to release the vessel Saturday night, according to Reuters.
But on Saturday morning, with rescue team and canal authorities still struggling to eradicate the four-footed leviathan, global supply chains were another day closer to a full-blown crisis.
Vessels full of the world’s goods – including cars, oil, stock and laptops – usually flow through the waterway easily, much of the world while ‘ in which they cross the fastest route from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and the east coast of the United States.
“Look around – 90 percent of what’s in the room came from China,” said Alan Murphy, founder of Sea-Intelligence, a marine data and analytics firm. “Global retail trade shifts in vessels, or 90 per cent of it. So everything is affected. Name any brand name, and they will be stuck on one of these vessels. “
Dispensing the bottles depends on the rescuers’ ability to clean away sand and mud at each end of the vessel and possibly reduce the load enough to help it sail again, while and tugs try to push and pull it for free. Their best chance may reach Monday, when a full spring raises the canal’s water level by about 18 inches, analysts and shipping representatives said.
On Friday, the ship’s technical manager, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, said larger tugs had arrived to help, with two more to be paid on Sunday. Several scrapers were digging around the ship’s bow, and high-capacity pumps pump water from the ship’s ballast tanks to loosen the vessel, the company said.
They have to clear other vessels from the area, great coordination effort. And they need to account for the possibility that the base of the Ever Given will be rearranged on the seabed, making it more difficult for other vessels to pass through the area even after they have been moved, Capt. Paul Foran, a marine consultant who has been working on a rescue operation.
With the vessel going in the middle, its bow and end are both trapped in places where it was not designed, the shell is vulnerable to pressure and cracks, the two experts said.
Mr. Mosselhy said teams of divers were inspecting the backyard and found no damage. But in most other respects, the Ever Given has accepted Murphy ‘s Law: He did everything that could go wrong, starting with the size of the ship, among the largest in the world. the world.
“It was the largest ship in the convoy, and it ended up in the worst part of the canal” – a narrow section with just one row, said Captain Sloane. “And that was just fine. unfortunate. “
If the ship breaks free before Monday, the shipping industry may accept the inconvenience, analysts said, but in addition, supply chains and consumers could begin to decline. see major upheavals.
Shipping experts said the wind may have been the main reason the ship got stuck in the canal, but suggested that human error may have come in as well.
“I seriously question, why was he the only one who went ashore?” Captain Foran said. “But they can talk about that later. Right now, they have to get that beast out of the canal. “
An armada of tugs, their engines mashing with the total power of tens of thousands of horses, have been pushing and towing at the Ever Given for days.
Masts, resembling plays under the shadow of the hulking cargo ship, have been scouring mountains of earth from the surrounding area where the bow and stern of the ship are tightly connected.
But with the ship stretching about 1,300 feet long – about the height of the Empire State Building – and weighing about 200,000 metric tons, by Saturday morning they had not yet been able to move the vessel.
Peter Berdowski, chief executive of Royal Boskalis Westminster, one of the companies named by the owner of Ever Given to help move the vessel, told Dutch current affairs program Nieuwsuur on Wednesday that the work could release the vessel “days, even weeks. “
Mr. Berdowski, whose company has been involved in the widening of the Suez Canal, said Ever Given was stuck on either shallow side of the V-shaped canal. the boat is “a heavy whale,” he said.
Authorities first attempted to launch the vessel using tugboats, an invention that worked to free the Indian Ocean CSCL, a similar-sized carrier that was sunk. River Elbe in 2016, near the port of Hamburg, Germany.
Mr. Berdowski said the Ever Given, operated by the Evergreen company, was too heavy for tugs only and so scraping equipment was being used to move the ground from around the vessel.
Video taken from the boat and provided by Mohammed Mosselhy, owner of First Suez International, a marine logging company at the canal, showed several excavators regularly digging at the edge of the turquoise water near the bow of the ship on Friday.
As the scribes worked, a team of eight Dutch rescue experts and naval architects oversaw the work inspecting the ship and the seabed and creating a computer model to help him navigate. work around the vessel without damaging it, Capt. said. Nick Sloane, a South African rescue master who led the campaign to rectify the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that sank in 2012 off the coast of Italy.
If the tugs, scrapers and pumps are unable to do the job, several spirals of special vessels and equipment may require perhaps hundreds of workers: small tankers to remove a siphon from fuel. the ship, the tallest masts in the world to unload some of its vessels one-to-one and, if masts are not high enough or close enough, heavy-duty helicopters capable of carrying vessels up to 20 tons construction – although no one has said where the cargo would go. (A tide of 40 feet can weigh up to 40 tons.)
Captain Sloane thought the work would take at least a week.
All because, to put it simply: “This is a big boat. This is a huge problem, ”said Richard Meade, editor-in-chief of Lloyd’s List, a London-based marine information publication.
“I don’t think there’s any question of having everything they need,” he said. “It’s just a question, it’s a big problem.”
With each day the Ever Given container ship remains stuck in the Suez Canal, the cost of the riot will increase.
After days of attempts to move the raspberry ship, ship owners began to head back to the Suez Canal around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, adding weeks to their voyages and burning extra fuel – a cost to consumers in the long run.
When deciding whether to move, a shipping company must consider the cost of sitting for days outside the canal compared to the extra time of steaming around Africa. It is not an easy choice.
“Choosing the post office queue is like it’s never the right decision,” said Alex Booth, head of research at Kpler, a company that oversees on petrol shipping.
Already, seven major carriers of liquefied natural gas appear to have changed course away from the waterway, according to Kpler.
Carriers are also changing their plans. HMM, a Korean shipping company, ordered one of its ships to sail to Asia from Britain via the waterway to go around Africa instead, according to Noh Ji-hwan, a strategy for the company.
As workers race to evacuate the critical trading artery, business leaders are trying to figure out how big the impact would be if the crisis escalates from days to weeks.
Two weeks could exceed a quarter of the supply of ships that would normally be in European ports, estimates Christian Roeloffs, chief executive of xChange, a shipping consultant in Hamburg, Germany.
“Considering the current shortage of vessels, it is simply increasing the turnaround time for the vessels,” said Mr. Roeloffs said.
Three-quarters of the ships arrived from Europe to Europe in late February, according to Sea-Intelligence, a research company in Copenhagen. Even a few days of unrest in the Suez could add to that.
If the Suez stays clogged for more than a few days, the stakes will rise dramatically. Vessels now locked in the canal will find it difficult to turn around and follow other routes, due to the narrowness of the channel.
When vessels move again through the waterway, they are likely to reach busy ports at the same time, forcing them to wait a long time before they can load them – an additional delay.
“This could make a real crisis even worse,” said Alan Murphy, founder of Sea-Intelligence.