CREWS FREE CONTAINER SHIP IN SUEZ CANAL
The mammoth cargo ship blocking the Suez Canal was wrenched from the shoreline and finally set free Monday, raising hopes that one of the world’s most vital maritime routes would quickly rebound and limit the fallout of a disruption that had paralyzed billions of dollars in global trade.
Within hours, other ships awaiting transit through the 120-mile waterway that connects the Mediterranean and Red Seas fired up their engines and began moving again.
Salvage teams, working on land and water for six days and nights, were ultimately assisted by forces more powerful than any machine rushed to the scene: the moon and the tides.
The ship, the quartermile-long Ever Given, was ultimately set free around 3 p.m., according to shipping officials. Horns blared in celebration as images emerged on social media of the oncestuck ship on the move.
“We pulled it off!,” Peter Berdowski, CEO of Royal Boskalis Westminster, a Dutch maritime salvage company hired by the vessel’s owner, said in a statement. The success, he said, had made “free passage through the Suez Canal possible again.”
President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt celebrated the moment on Twitter, writing that “Egyptians have succeeded today in ending the crisis of the stuck ship in the Suez Canal despite the great complexities surrounding this situation in every aspect.”
The stern, or the back of the ship, was clearly free from the land early Monday. But for hours until the ship was finally freed, it had remained uncertain if the ship’s bulbous bow had been truly pulled from the mud and muck on the banks of the canal.
Salvage crews had worked around a schedule largely dictated by the tides: working to make progress during the six hours it would take for the water to go from low point to high and then back again.
With a full moon Sunday, the following 24 hours had offered the best window to work, with a few extra inches of tidal flow providing a vital assist for their efforts.
Throughout the night Sunday and into Monday, tugboats worked in coordination with dredgers to return the 220,000-ton vessel to the water.
Then, just before dawn, the ship slowly regained buoyancy.
It was a turning point in one of the largest and most intense salvage operations in modern history, with the smooth functioning of the global trading system hanging in the balance.
The army of machine operators, engineers, tugboat captains and other salvage operators knew they were in a race against time.
Each day of blockage put global supply chains another day closer to a full-blown crisis.
Vessels packed with the world’s goods — including cars, oil, livestock and laptops — usually flow through the canal with ease, supplying much of the globe as they traverse the quickest path from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and the East Coast of the United States.
With concerns that the salvage operation could take weeks, some ships decided not to wait, turning to take the long way around the southern tip of Africa, a voyage that can add weeks to the journey and more than $26,000 a day in fuel costs.
The company that oversees the ship’s operations and crew, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, said 11 tugboats had helped, with two joining the effort Sunday. Several dredgers, including a specialized suction dredger that can extract 2,000 cubic meters of material per hour, dug around the vessel’s bow, the company said.
With the Ever Given sagging in the middle, its bow and stern both caught in positions for which they were not designed, the hull had been vulnerable to stress and cracks, according to experts. Just as every high tide brought hope the ship could be released, each low tide put new stresses on the vessel.
Teams of divers inspected the hull throughout the operation and found no damage, officials said. The ship was to be inspected again after it was freed.
Assisted by a flotilla of tugboats, the ship was towed north to the Great Bitter Lake, the widest part of the 120-mile-long waterway, so it could be further inspected and so delayed traffic could once gain flow smoothly.