A massive container vessel, which is one of the largest in the world, has blocked the Suez canal, turning sideways and threatening to disrupt the global shipping system.
The massive vessel which is 400m-long, 59m-wide vessel, ‘The MV Ever Given’, and Panama-flagged ship that carries trade between Asia and Europe ran aground and became lodged sideways across the Suez Canal, Egypt’s narrow waterway on Tuesday.
Its operators, Evergreen Marine, suspect that it was “hit by a sudden wind, causing the hull to deviate and accidentally hit the bottom.
An Egyptian official said tugboats had been deployed to help refloat the ship but the operation is set to take at least two days.
According to the report by Associated Press, GAC, a global shipping and logistics company, described the Ever Given as suffering “a blackout while transiting in a northerly direction,” without elaborating.
Evergreen Marine Corp., a major Taiwan-based shipping company that operates the ship, said in a statement provided to The Associated Press that the Ever Given had been overcome by strong winds as it entered the Suez Canal from the Red Sea but none of its containers had sunk.
“All crew are safe and accounted for,” said Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, which manages the Ever Given. “There have been no reports of injuries or pollution.”
An image posted to Instagram by a user on another waiting cargo ship appeared to showed the Ever Given wedged across the canal as shown in the satellite data.
The incident could have a major knock-on effect for global shipping moving between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, warned Salvatore R. Mercogliano, a former merchant mariner and associate professor of history at North Carolina’s Campbell University.
“Every day, 50 vessels on average go through that canal, so the closing of the canal means no vessels are transiting north and south,” Mercogliano told the AP. “Every day the canal is closed container ships and tankers are not delivering food, fuel and manufactured goods to Europe and goods are not being exported from Europe to the Far East.”
The Ever Given had listed its destination as Rotterdam in the Netherlands prior to getting stuck in the canal. The ship, built in 2018 with a length of nearly 400 meters (a quarter mile) and a width of 59 meters (193 feet), is among the largest cargo ships in the world. It can carry some 20,000 containers at a time.