Suez Canal: Why is freeing the stranded ship so complicated? | DW News

the ship plugging the choke point that funnels 30 of the global seaborne trade 400 meters long and weighing more than 200 000 tons the ever given has become an immovable barrier shutting down egypt's suez canal with around 10 billion dollars in trade at stake every day diggers tugboats dredgers and a team of dutch ship salvagers are working day and night to dislodge the vessel a hiccup like this sort of sets everyone back everyone was already scrambling to get back to normal and serve what has been quite strong demand for traded goods and yeah no one needs another delay on top of everything else and it does underline just how important and how finely balanced the whole system is more than 200 ships are caught in the world's longest maritime traffic jam some of them are now rerouting their journey around the cape of good hope a trip almost three times as long the fear is that consumers will be noticing the delays before long biggest impact is that component parts for electronic chemical and engineering industries will not arrive on time with a clock ticking the u.s is among a growing list of countries offering help to refloat the ever given let's get some more details on this developing story you'd like to welcome now dr sela marcoliano he is a maritime historian and a former merchant mariner mr marcoyano a very warm welcome so far attempts to re-float this massive 220 000 ton giant have been unsuccessful besides the obvious size problem why is this such a complicated mission uh it's complicated because of the position the vessel is in uh she hit and rammed herself literally impaled herself into asia and her stern is hung up on africa and she's hanging between them in the suez canal puts her in a very precarious position with the weight of the vessel on its ends you have to be extremely careful about putting what's called longitudinal stress but basically you don't want to cause the middle of the vessel to sag crack uh begin to leak or flood or worst case catastrophically fail they already have flooding in the forward sections the four peak in the bow thruster rooms they want to be careful about minimizing further damage to the vessel and i understand that you believe there are signs now that dislodging the vessel might actually take longer than initially thought why is that well we saw the parent company evergreen begin to route their vessels around africa so that's a clear indication that uh they think this may take a long time we know the anchorages are filling up south and north of the canal so even if they were able to clear the canal immediately there would still be days of backlogs of vessels to get out there the egyptians have begun to dredge along the forward section of the vessel along the port side the north side of the vessel but the survey company smith probably would want to do a full survey of the vessel there's a danger of going too fast and potentially endangering the vessel they don't want the vessel to shift they don't want it to roll and as i said before they don't want to cause further damage that would expand this but at the same time the egyptians want to get this vessel out a you know an official in egypt today talked about the fact that the canal will be cleared in 48 to 72 hours i think that's optimistic uh beyond what the capabilities are showing us right now now the cargo industry as you know has been trying to maximize profit in recent years by dispatching bigger and bigger ships with smaller and smaller crews was this a disaster waiting to happen well in many ways this this event was brought on by the last closure of the suez canal when the suez canal closed during 1968 and you had the eight year closure for it uh the maritime industry had a route around africa and they started developing these larger vessels what we call economy of scale let's put more cargo on a single vessel instead of across several vessels the suez canal was expanded in 2015 to specifically to handle a vessel like the ever given and again our economy we demand you know low-cost uh transportation and the way to afford that is by creating these larger and larger vessels and the question is was this passage of the ever given through the canal prudent at the time if they had concerns about high winds as the company is saying then the pilots on board should have been aware of that they shouldn't have taken the vessel into the canal the vessel was only about five miles into the canal at the time very complicated stuff there dr cell mercuriano thank you so much sir for inviting us thank you

Channel: DW News

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Keywords: DW News, Suez Canal, Egypt, container ship, Suez Canal has been blocked, MV Ever Given, Evergreen Line, suez blockage, ever given, suez ship, suez canal ship, suez canal, Sal Mercogliano, mercogliano

Id: IT1QbgENcOM

Length: 5min 9sec (309 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021