Shipping losses mount from cargo vessel stuck in Suez Canal
ISMAILIA, EGYPT >> Dredgers, tugboats and even a backhoe failed to free a giant cargo ship wedged in Egypt’s Suez Canal on Thursday. More than 150 vessels are now backed up, with hundreds more headed to the vital waterway, and losses to global shipping are mounting.
The skyscraper- sized Ever Given, carrying cargo between Asia and Europe, ran aground Tuesday in the narrow, man-made canal dividing continental Africa from the Sinai Peninsula. Even helped by high tides, authorities have been unable to push the Panamaf lagged container vessel aside, and they are looking for new ideas to free it.
In a sign of the turmoil the blockage has caused, the ship’s Japanese owner even offered a written apology.
“We are determined to keep on working hard to resolve this situation as soon as possible,” Shoei Kisen Kaisha Ltd. said. “We would like to apologize to all parties affected by this incident, including the ships travelling and planning to travel through Suez Canal.”
As efforts to free it resumed at daylight Thursday, an Egyptian canal authority official said workers hoped to avoid offloading containers from the vessel as it would take days to do so and extend the closure. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as he wasn’t authorized to talk to journalists.
So far, dredgers have tried to clear silt around the massive ship. Tug boats nudged the vessel alongside it, trying to gain momentum. From the shore, at least one backhoe dug into the canal’s sandy banks, suggesting the bow of the ship had plowed into it. However, satellite photos taken Thursday and analyzed by The Associated Press showed the vessel still stuck in the same location.
The vessel remained stuck as of Thursday night despite “continuous” efforts to refloat it, according to canal service provider Leth Agencies.
Lt. Gen. Osama Rabei, the head of the canal authority, said navigation through the waterway would remain halted until the Ever Given is refloated. A team from Boskalis, a Dutch firm specialized in salvaging, arrived at the canal Thursday, although one of its top officials warned removing the vessel could take “days to weeks.”
A team from the Boskalis subsidiary SMIT “spent the day doing inspections and doing calculations to assess the state of the vessel and a plan on how to refloat the vessel,” spokesman Martijn Schuttevaer told the AP. He did not offer a time frame.
The Suez Canal Authority said one idea the team discussed was scraping the bottom of the canal around the ship.
Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, the company that manages the Ever Given, said they were focusing on dredging to remove sand and mud from around the port side of the vessel’s bow. It said a specialized suction dredger would join other dredgers on the site. That dredger is able to shift 2,000 cubic meters of material every hour, it said.
“BSM’s continuing priorities are to safely re-float the vessel and for marine traffic in the Suez Canal to resume,” it said without providing timeframe.
Boskalis chairman Peter Berdowski on Wednesday described the ship as “a very heavy whale on the beach.”
“The ship, with the weight it now has, can’t really be pulled free. You can forget it,” he told the Dutch current affairs program “Nieuwsuur.”
Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement said its 25-member crew was safe and accounted for. Shoei Kisen Kaisha said all the crew came from India.
The ship had two pilots from Egypt’s canal authority aboard the vessel to guide it when the grounding happened around 7:45 a.m. Tuesday, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement said.
Canal service provider Leth Agencies said at least 150 ships were waiting for the Ever Given to be cleared, including vessels near Port Said on the Mediterranean Sea, Port Suez on the Red Sea and those already stuck in the canal system on Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake.
Cargo ships already behind the Ever Given in the canal will be reversed south back to Port Suez to free the channel, Leth Agencies said. Authorities hope to do the same to the Ever Given when they can free it.
But many more ships already are en route to the canal.
Using data from Automatic Identification System trackers on ships at sea, data firm Refinitiv shared an analysis with the AP showing over 300 ships remained on the way to the waterway over the next two weeks. Some vessels could still change course, but the crush of ships listing the Suez Canal as their destination shows an even-greater backlog looms for shippers already under pressure amid the coronavirus pandemic.
LONDON >> British lawmakers agreed Thursday to prolong coronavirus emergency measures for six months, allowing the Conservative government to keep its unprecedented powers to restrict U.K. citizens’ everyday lives.
The House of Commons voted to extend the powers until September, and approved the government’s road map for gradually easing Britain’s strict coronavirus lockdown over the next three months.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s large Conservative majority in Parliament guaranteed the measures passed by a decisive 484-76 margin. But Johnson faced rebellion from some of his own party’s lawmakers, who argued that the economic, democratic and human costs of the restrictions outweigh the benefits.
The Coronavirus Act, passed a year ago as Britain went into lockdown, brought in a wide range of temporary health, economic and social powers to deal with the pandemic. It gives authorities the power to bar protests, shut down businesses, restrict travel and detain people suspected of having the virus.
Heath Secretary Matt Hancock said Parliament had had to take “extraordinary measures in response to this extraordinary threat.”
But Conservative lawmaker Mark Harper, a leading lockdown skeptic, said he had not “heard a single good answer” as to why the British government needed to extend the “draconian” powers for another six months.
The opposition Liberal Democrats opposed the extension, with leader Ed Davey saying it gave ministers “a blank check to use draconian powers they don’t need.” Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn also spoke out against them, saying “our liberties are at stake.”
Britain has recorded more than 126,000 coronavirus deaths, the highest toll in Europe. But the U.K.’s fast-moving vaccination program has so far given at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine to more than half of its adult population, a far better record than the European Union’s muchcriticized vaccine rollout.
Virus infections and deaths in Britain have fallen sharply in the last month even as they are rising in much of Europe.