AFTER nearly six days of being lodged aground in the Suez Canal, the Ever Given container ship is now afloat. That’s according to Inchcape, a shipping services provider. However, the ship being floated may not fix the entire problem, as the giant Ever Given still needs to be maneavored to free passage through the canal.

The Suez Canal is one of the world’s most important waterways. Located 120 kilometers east of Cairo, the capital of Egypt, it links the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, allowing for direct shipping from Europe to Asia. Roughly 12 percent of the world’s shipping traffic and a chunk of its oil supply goes through the manmade canal, which has become particularly vital following pandemic-related disruptions to shipping.

If the canal’s cargo traffic is disrupted, that means delays in everything from oil to food to clothing to semiconductors.

With the waterway blockage entering its sixth day, the fallout is reverbarating around the world. Finally yesterday morning Egypt time, a breakthrough was reached.

Latest update

The Ever Given was lodged firmly into the embankments on each side of the Suez Canal. Now, after six days of rigorous efforts, the ship has been refloated, according to Inchcape.

“The MV Ever Given was successfully re-floated at 4:30 a.m. Monday. She is being secured at the moment. More information about next steps will follow once they are known,” the company tweeted.

It’s a pivitol moment of progress, but the saga isn’t over quite yet. The Ever Given is longer than the width of the canal. It’ll need to be moved around — a tough task — before the 300-plus ships stuck in the canal bottleneck can gain passage.

The vessel’s refloating comes after two additional tugboats were deployed Sunday to help a fleet of around 10 similar boats extract the 200,000-ton Ever Given. At the same time, the Suez Canal Authority over the weekend deployed more onland heavy machinery working to dig around the ship’s bow, which would make it easier for the vessel to be pulled out.

Authorities have been working to extract the vessel for nearly a week. Time is of the essence here. Experts say a couple days of delay would be a major inconvenience for shipping companies, but that a week or more of delays could prove catastrophic and not just for shipping companies.

“If the ship were to remain stuck for another week it could cause massive delays in the delivery of products, and every second of delay leaves billions of dollars’ worth of disruptions on the line,” Jennifer Bisceglie, CEO of supply chain risk management firm Interos, said Friday.

Peter Berdowski, CEO of Boskalis, the company leading the rescue effort, cautioned Thursday that the Ever Given being stuck for weeks is a very real possibility.

“We can’t exclude it might take weeks, depending on the situation,” Berdowski told the Dutch television program Nieuwsuur. “It is like an enormous beached whale. It’s an enormous weight on the sand.”

Shoei Kisen Kaisha, the company that owns the Ever Given, released a statement Thursday apologizing for the issue. Meanwhile, the U.S. Government has offered assistance to the Suez Canal Authority.

What happened?

Ever Given is a 200,000-ton cargo ship that spans 400 meters, roughly the length of four football fields.

On March 20, just before 8 a.m. Egypt time, strong gusts of wind knocked it off course. En route to Rotterdam from China, it was holding around 20,000 shipping containers of cargo, estimated to be worth US$9 billion, when it became wedged in the canal’s east bank.

“The accident is mainly due to the lack of visibility resulting from bad weather conditions as the country passes through a dust storm, with wind speed reaching 40 knots,” Suez Canal Authority’s Rabie said in a statement.

No one on board was injured, according to the ship’s technical manager, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement. But the task of extricating the Ever Given is momentous.

The Suez Canal Authority deployed a gang of tugboats March 20 to pull the Ever Given out of its predicament, with more joining the effort throughout the week, with little success — until Sunday. Smit Salvage, a renowned maritime rescue company, was hired Wednesday to assist the SCA break the bottleneck.

Officials from Smit Salvage on Thursday told AP the rescue operation could take “days to weeks,” though Mohab Mamish, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s adviser on seaports and the former chair of the Suez Canal Authority, told the same news agency Thursday that navigation through the canal “will resume again within 48-72 hours, maximum.”

With news of the ship’s refloating coming, a new phase of the mission will begin.

What does this mean?

Approximately 321 ships have been amassed in the bottleneck, according to the Suez Canal Authority.

When the ship was lodged, shipping companies faced a dilemma: wait for the Ever Given to be floated or divert around the Horn of Africa, another sea route that links Europe and Asia. The latter option would delay shipments by up to 14 days.

Such delays could cause severe shortages, as the global shipping industry is already beset by a lack of shipping containers and other complications arising from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Oil is particularly vulnerable to the blockage, with the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869, being a key route for transporting oil from the Middle East to Asia and Europe.

Brent crude oil, the price of which is used as an international benchmark, rose 2.85 percent after news of the Ever Given’s plight broke. The rise is tempered by further COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in Europe, which has decreased demand for oil.

Local officials hope the issue can be resolved within days, but longer delays would make oil price spikes the beginning of the world’s trouble.

“The Suez Canal accounts for nearly 30 percent of all container ship traffic,” explained Interos’ Bisceglie. “With carriers transporting oil, natural gas, clothing, food, electronics, machinery, and even semiconductor chips, an item which has already been in the midst of a global shortage.”

Has this happened before?

Yes.

Following mechanical issues, a Japanese vessel became lodged in the ground under the canal water in 2017. Tugboats refloated the ship within hours. A year prior, the CSCL Indian Ocean spent five days aground before being pulled out by tugboats.

At first, officials at the Canal hoped to dislodge the Ever Given within a day or two. Instead, the Ever Given is into its sixth day of being stuck, giving it the dubious honor of blocking the canal longer than any other cargo ship in history.

If the vessel can be righted in two days, “the impact will be limited to a gradual worsening of already very bad vessel delays.

“If ... the Suez Canal remains blocked for another three to five days,” Sea-Intelligence vice president of product and operations Niels Madsen told Reuters, “then this will start to have very serious global ramifications.”

That comment was made four days ago.

(SD-Agencies)