More than 300 ships were prevented from transiting the canal after the Ever Given was beached last week, its quarter-mile length blocking the waterway. “Thank God, there were no deaths, injuries, or leaks,” General Rabie said. He said the ship had been moved north to the Great Bitter Lake, the widest part of the canal, where inspectors will examine it for possible damage. local time - less than three hours after the Ever Given was refloated - traffic paralyzed by the ship had resumed moving, General Rabie said. “We have been harmed by the incident.”Īs of 6 p.m.
“The Suez Canal is not at fault,” General Rabie told reporters at a news conference in Ismailia, a city at the 120-mile-long canal’s halfway point. Osama Rabie, chairman of the Suez Canal Authority, put the cost to Egypt of the disruption at between $12 million and $15 million a day, and said an investigation would determine who was responsible for paying it. Praising the salvagers who freed the cargo vessel Ever Given six days after it grounded, the head of the Egyptian agency that runs the Suez Canal said Monday night that traffic had resumed in both directions of the crucial maritime passageway.īut Lt. Osama Rabie, chairman of the Suez Canal Authority, at a news conference on Monday evening. Leth Agencies, a shipping services provider that specializes in canal passages, said on Twitter that with the Ever Given now safely out of the way, 43 other vessels awaiting southbound transit at Great Bitter Lake had resumed their voyages toward the Red Sea end of the canal. The ship was to be inspected again after it was freed.Īssisted by a flotilla of tugboats, the ship was towed north to the Great Bitter Lake, the widest part of the canal, so it could be further inspected and so delayed traffic could once gain flow smoothly. Teams of divers inspected the hull throughout the operation and found no damage, officials said. 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. The company that oversees the ship’s operations and crew, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, said 11 tugboats had helped, with two joining the struggle on Sunday.
The container ship stuck in the Suez Canal has been fully dislodged and is currently floating, after six days of blocking the vital trade route. 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. Then, just before dawn, the ship slowly regained buoyancy. Throughout the night on Sunday and into Monday, tugboats worked in coordination with dredgers to return the 220,000-ton vessel to the water.
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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.Ī full moon on Sunday gave the salvager an especially promising 24-hour window to work in, with a few extra inches of tidal flow providing a vital assist.
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President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi 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.”Įarly Monday, the stern of the Ever Given was clearly free from land, but it was some hours before it was certain that the ship’s bulbous bow had been successfully pulled from the mud and muck on the banks of the canal.
“We pulled it off!” Peter Berdowski, chief executive of Royal Boskalis Westminster, a Dutch maritime salvage company hired by the vessel’s owner, said in a statement. Horns blared in celebration as images emerged on social media of the ship once again on the move. The ship, the quarter-mile-long Ever Given, was ultimately set free at around 3 p.m., according to shipping officials. 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. Within hours, other ships awaiting transit through the 120-mile-long waterway that connects the Mediterranean and Red Seas, waylaid for nearly a week, fired up their engines and began moving again. The mammoth cargo ship blocking the Suez Canal was wrenched from the shoreline and finally set free on 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.
The Ever Given, after it was fully floated on Monday.