The vessel blocking the Suez Canal has been disentangled
Work to refloat the vessel Ever Given, stranded in the Suez Canal since last Tuesday, was successful early Monday morning, according to the maritime services company Inchcape Shipping.
The container ship was refloated at 4:30 local Egyptian time and Inchcape Shipping said the vessel "is secured". Meanwhile, Leth Agencies confirmed that 367 ships are waiting to transit the Suez Canal, one of the world's most important trade lanes connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Of these, 98 are bulk carriers, 96 are containers and 35 are carrying oil. The Suez Canal Authority also confirmed that the Ever Given was refloated.
The head of the Suez Canal Authority, Admiral Osama Rabi, had announced early Monday morning that work to try to disentangle the vessel was resuming with the assistance of more than a dozen giant tugboats operating from four different directions. Despite having managed to disentangle the ship, no date has been announced for the moment as to when maritime traffic will be resumed.
The ship ran aground on Tuesday, blocking the Suez Canal and halting an estimated €9 billion a day flow of trade.
Various canal and straits logistics service companies said the Ever Given, owned by Evergreen, was "partially refloated" on Monday after six days stranded in the Suez Canal, although it remains to be confirmed when passage will resume.
“Ever Given has been partially refloated in the Suez Canal,” said the firm Leth Agencies when publishing a satellite photo of the giant container ship that showed that the stern of the boat had moved, an information also published by the firm Inchcape, which added that the ship “is being insured”, as reported by the media El País. This progress was made after the start of some ten tugboats and several dredgers took advantage of the high tide at dawn on Monday, a progress announced by the Suez Canal Authority on its Facebook account.
It remains to be seen when the vessel will be fully released in a week in which the authorities were optimistic that a full moon and rising tides would help undock the 400-metre-long vessel.
Maersk, the main shipping company operating in the Suez Canal, said on Sunday that, once the passage has been freed, it will take between three and six days to undo the huge traffic jam that has been generated in this waterway, which is the shortest maritime route between Asia and Europe, as reported by the EFE news agency.
Already this Sunday, the rudder and propellers of the Ever Given, the mega-ship that ran aground in the Suez Canal blocking the passage of this very important waterway, were freed, according to the maritime services company Gulf Agency Company (GAC), one of the companies working in the area; meanwhile, the Suez Canal Authority, in charge of managing the maritime infrastructure, continued with the dredging of land to free the hull of the blocked ship.
A new attempt to refloat the vessel at high tide failed on Saturday night, but on the following day it was confirmed "that the rudder and propellers had already been freed", according to the Dubai-based firm GAC on its website. Now the ship has finally been freed from its stranding, pending the reactivation of traffic on the important Suez Canal waterway.
The blockage of the Suez Canal had already prompted the search for alternative routes to continue the commercial transit of containers and goods. Some shipping lines considered different routes, in particular the one around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope. However, this route, which would avoid the collapse of the Suez Canal, would add at least 10 days to shipping, according to the International Chamber of Shipping. For its part, Russia put forward the option of the Arctic Route, a proposal it defended as the fastest, cheapest, safest and most environmentally friendly way of transporting goods, but which has yet to prove its reliability.
