Crews free stuck container ship in Egypt's Suez Canal after nearly a week
March 29 (UPI) -- Work crews have successfully refloated the jammed container ship in Egypt's Suez Canal, one of the world's most vital trade waterways, the canal's service provider said Monday.
The Suez Canal Authority said the 200,000-ton, 1,300-foot Ever Given cargo ship was freed from the shoreline in the canal after nearly a week. The Ever Given is one of the largest cargo ships in the worlThe SCA told CNN the Ever Given had been fully dislodged and images posted online showed the vessel on the move.
"This was the result of successful push and tow maneuvers which led to the restoration," the SCA said in a statement.
The ship became stuck in the canal during a sandstorm last Tuesday when it drifted into shallow waters and ran aground. Crews have been trying to free the vessel since.
The SCA said earlier Monday that the beached vessel had been partially refloated.
Lt. Gen. Osama Rabie, chairman of the Suez Canal Authority, said crews were performing "tugging maneuvers" with 10 giant tug boats to free the grounded ship, which has close to 20,000 cargo containers on board.
The blocked canal, which provides vital shipping access between the Mediterranean and Red seas, has led to some supply chain issues for products worldwide -- including Brent crude oil.
Authorities said earlier that the canal will reopen to traffic once the Ever Given was fully floated and towed to another part of the canal for inspection.
"Today, Egyptians have succeeded in ending the crisis of the delinquent ship on the Suez Canal despite the massive technical complexity surrounding this process on every side," Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi said early Monday in a statement posted to his Facebook page.
"Egyptians have proven today that they are always as responsible. I thank every sincere Egyptian who contributed technically and practically to ending this crisis."
The canal's operator, which is owned by the Egyptian government, earlier posted a video to its Facebook page that showed crews dredging and performing other salvage work to free the vessel.
Almost 400 vessels are awaiting transit through the canal, officials said.
WATCH THE AMAZING MOMENT AS THE GIANT SHIP FINALLY GETS UNSTUCK
HERE'S WHAT IT TOOK TO GET IT UNSTUCK.
Ever Given
After six days of being wedged in the banks of the Suez Canal, the giant container ship known as the “Ever Given” finally broke free on Monday afternoon local time.
It posed a massive disruption as it blocked the waterway, with hundreds of cargo ships waiting at either end of the canal. The canal accounts for an astonishing 12 percent of global trade.
But now, videos uploaded to social media show the skyscraper-sized container ship slowly making its way down the canal.
Tireless Effort
Salvage teams worked tirelessly to get the ship moving again for five days and nights. The stern — that’s the rear end — of the ship broke free first earlier this morning. Hours later, the bow, a massive bulb of steel that wedged itself head on into the side of the canal’s walls was also successfully dislodged.
Monday turned out to be the ideal time to break it free. That’s thanks to Sunday’s full moon providing teams with a few extra inches of tidal flow during high tide, as The New York Times reports.
It was a gigantic undertaking, involving countless operators, tugboats, and excavators working against the clock. Specialized dredgers, which are essentially colossal vacuum cleaners, sucked up 2,000 cubic meters of material per hour to dig out the Ever Given’s bow.
That was in addition to entire teams of divers who had a look beneath the ship to inspect it for damage, according to the Times.
Let My Containers Go
Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi claimed the event as a dramatic win for the Middle Eastern nation. “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,” he wrote in a statement on Twitter.
The blockade is not over yet. Engineers will now be inspecting the chopped up canal for damage to ensure safe passage over the next couple of days, according to NYT.
READ MORE: After days of struggle, salvage crews freed the giant container ship. [The New York Times]
by Stephen Turnock, The Conversation
MARCH 29, 2021
One of the world's largest container ships, named Ever Given, has been wedged across the Suez Canal since it was blown off course by high winds in the early hours of March 23, blocking one of the busiest maritime trade corridors in the world.
The incident has created a logjam of hundreds of tankers, the operators of which are now weighing up whether to wait for the stranded container ship to be cleared, or whether rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope, at the southernmost point of Africa, will hasten their arrival at port.
That decision hinges upon how long it'll take to refloat the Ever Given, tugging it away from the banks of the canal and back into operation. Several maritime salvage firms, with experience rescuing stricken vessels, are already in attendance at the scene—but it's unclear how much time they'll need to dislodge the ship.
The methods they'll use to do so, however, will be the roughly the same as past examples. A grounded ship of any size requires additional buoyancy to help salvage crews ease it from where it's stuck. And, in the case of the Ever Given, horizontal force—applied by tug boats—will be required to heave the ship from both banks of the Suez Canal.
How it happened
The Ever Given is 400 meters in length and has the capacity to carry over 20,000 20-foot containers. It was these containers, stacked high on the deck, that are suspected to have caught the gust of wind, like a sailboat's sail, that ultimately blew the ship off course.
It appears that the Ever Given lost control while heading northbound along the Suez Canal, diverting its course in such a way that one end struck one of the canal's banks. The momentum of the massive vessel will then have pulled it round until the other end struck the other bank—slowly, perhaps, but with a huge amount of force.
The precise way in which the Ever Given struck ground will be important for salvage teams to understand because, when refloating a grounded ship, it's usually easiest to extract it the way it went in—as with a splinter.
Salvaging ships
Salvaging has always been an important part of maritime operations, with specialist companies called in when large container ships or tankers run aground. The process of freeing grounded vessels is often referred to as refloating.
In 2016, a ship of similar size to the Ever Given, called the CSCL Indian Ocean, took six days to refloat after grounding on the bank of the Elbe River in Germany. The same salvage techniques used then will be used this time around—albeit in the more restrictive environment of a narrow canal.
There are two basic approaches to extracting a grounded ship. First, salvage crews will work to increase the vessel's vertical buoyancy force, which means the whole boat floats higher in the water.
Second, tug boats will apply sufficient horizontal force to overcome the static friction generated by whatever material the boat is resting upon. The larger and heavier the vessel, the more force required by the tug boats to refloat the ship.
Fleets of tugs
Swiftest to mobilize are a fleet of tugs, eight of which are already in position at the site of the stranded ship. But reports from the scene suggest that tugs have already attempted an unsuccessful operation to unwedge the ship.
That means the first priority of salvage teams will instead be to make the Ever Given float higher in the water—by dredging near the sections of the bank upon which the ship is stranded, and by increasing the ship's buoyancy.
In previous salvage operations, buoyancy air bags have been attached to the underwater section of the hull to encourage it to float. But in the case of the Ever Given, this will need to happen alongside the unloading of the ship's cargo, the removing of all on-board ballast water, and the draining of the ship's fuel, all in an effort to make the vessel lighter and more buoyant before the tugs attempt another horizontal pull.
The removal of cargo will be particularly challenging in this case. Seeing as land access will be difficult due to the Suez Canal's sandy surrounds, a floating crane may be required, which will take time to transport to the ship and which will only be able to remove one container at a time.
It might prove quicker to pump the fuel off the vessel instead of removing containers, which would require a small refueling vessel to pull alongside to take on the fuel. Those overseeing the salvage will have access to computer models of the vessel to tell exactly which load-lightening strategy will be most effective.
High tide
Despite all these measures, increasing buoyancy during salvage usually relies on a rising tide, which provides an extra boost in sea level for the ship to potentially refloat upon. Unfortunately, the tidal range within the Suez Canal is limited compared to coastal waters, which will hamper refloating attempts—though a promising "spring tide", which is higher than the usual high tide, is due over the weekend.
It's difficult to predict the rapidity with which the various components of the salvage puzzle can be brought to bear in the Suez Canal. This is not a standard salvage operation: the time pressure, with ships queuing at either end of the strait, will be weighing on everyone's minds.
But with expert salvage crews now on hand, and tried-and-tested refloating methods being put in place around the Ever Given, it's likely to be only a matter of days—rather than weeks—before the ship is unwedged from the Suez Canal.
Investigative team members of the World Health Organisation are seen visiting a Huanan seafood market in Wuhan. (Getty)
A member from the World Health Organisation team of experts uses his smartphone to record after boarding a bus to leave at the end of a two weeks quarantine at a hotel in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province on January 28, 2021. (AP)
Wuhan has no recorded COVID-19 cases of community transmissions since May 2020, life for residents is gradually returning to normal. (Getty)
