Getting to Egypt, by the way, was the most hassle I've
ever had on a reporting trip. It was the fact that
when I arrived in Egypt, absolutely no one wanted to talk to me. By going to the Suez Canal, I visited the Suez Canal control tower and seeing for myself how things worked. It was only by going to the
litigation in the court, in Ismailia, and hearing the lawyers talk about the problems on the bridge, that we learned all this new information. A giant container ship is blocking the Suez Canal. One of the world's busiest waterways, the route is vital for
the movement of everything from oil to consumer goods. Initially people blamed
strong winds, but you know, it was never a very
satisfactory explanation, simply because strong winds
in that part of the world happened for about half the year. Bad weather may not be the main reason why the ship got stuck. It could have been a
technical or a human error. That will be revealed
through the investigation. According to evidence that was presented in an Egyptian court, the pilots
at one point were arguing, shouting at each other, trading insults. So if this lasts for
anything more than a day, it could cause major headaches for global shipping and energy markets. Why did this situation even
occur in the first place? This ship is so huge. It's as long as the Empire
State Building is tall. And it is blocking the entire
width of the Suez Canal since it ran aground on Tuesday. I think most of us aren't aware of just how much global trade hangs by a thread. Hi, my name's Kit and I'm a reporter for Bloomberg. I thought it was critical to actually go to Egypt to report this story. I visited the Suez Canal Authority, I spoke to the chief pilots. I attended a couple of the court hearings and saw the ship owners
lawyers make the argument for the first time that
there had been some fault in the hands of the Suez Canal pilots. I'm Matthew Campbell. I am a reporter and editor
for Bloomberg Businessweek. So modern ships of all sizes really, have something called a voyage
data recorder on the bridge. The idea is to capture audio
of everything that goes on. So in the case of the Ever Given, as in so many marine accidents, the evidence from the VDR
became really critical to determining what actually occurred. The urgent effort to dislodge a cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal, blocking a key global trading route. This is a traffic jam like no other. There was this rippling
cascade of disruption to global trade, and therefore
lots and lots of people who might argue that they lost money as a result of what occurred on board the Ever Given in late March. Then, the happenings on the bridge, what was recorded by the VDR, becomes a matter of incredible sensitivity because it is just crucial evidence. Ships have, with some exceptions, just gotten bigger and bigger
over the last 30 or 40 years. The Ever Given, if you
include the value of the ship, the value of the fuel on board, and the 17,000 odd
containers it was carrying, it comes to about a billion dollars. This is one of the largest objects that humans have ever put on the ocean. There was a crew of 25 led by a captain named Krishnan Kanthavel, a very experienced
mariner from Tamil Nadu. It had set sail from Asia, and was due to arrive in
Rotterdam a couple of weeks later. In the Suez Canal, you typically transit
early in the morning. So the Ever Given would've
been emerging from the Red Sea, coming into the Suez Canal. There were terrible winds at that point, a whipping sand, a really severe storm. And enough wind, in
fact, that some vessels decided that they did not want to proceed through the canal on that day. The captain of the Ever
Given, Captain Kanthavel, would have had a choice
about whether to proceed. It is always the final
decision of the captain. But there are huge financial pressures on a captain in this situation. The shipping industry is
a just in time business. A captain of his experience
would be keenly aware that there were huge
amounts of money riding on getting his cargo to Europe on time. If you look at the Suez
Canal from a satellite, it looks like a fairly straight
shot through the desert, with a couple of lakes on the way. And you would imagine, I
imagined, that it wouldn't be particularly difficult to steer a ship straight through the passage. But actually, it's a very
stressful thing to do, we're told by all all the sailors and captains that we spoke to. It's a very narrow gap in places, 200 meters or so wide, and quite shallow. So any mistake is liable to
cause an incident of some kind. So when big ships come
into narrow waterways, typically they will take on
board at least one pilot. And a pilot is someone who
really intimately knows a particular area and
can advise the captain and the helmsmen of a ship
who may not be familiar with that waterway on what to
avoid, dangerous currents, submerged hazards, that kind of thing. They don't actually steer the ship, but they give instructions as to the best way to get through. They have to communicate with the captain and the other crew on the
bridge of the Ever Given, which is a difficult conversation to have because the captain and the
crew are mostly using English. The Egyptian pilots would mostly have been speaking in Arabic. So it would have been
quite difficult for them to have a proper conversation. We were told by almost
everyone we interviewed that the dynamic between
the captain and the crew, and the local Egyptian officials, can be a tense one when
they're going through Suez. And there's a few reasons for that. The captain is the master of his ship. In normal circumstances he has complete control over the crew. He's the boss. But when you go through Suez, you have to surrender some of that control to the local pilots whose job it is to steer the vessel through the canal. When you do speak to people in the shipping industry, you will quickly learn that Suez pilots have a pretty mixed reputation. We had lots of reports of pilots asking for cigarettes, for example, asking for other gifts in
return for their cooperation in getting through the canal. And all of these things add up to make it quite a fraught situation. So the Ever Given comes into the canal in these very windy conditions, and you have to think
about the scale here. This is a vessel that is 400 meters long. It's also, at the top of its containers, more than 50 meters above the waterline. So it really is an enormous surface for the wind to smack against. And what appears to have happened is the Ever Given began to
act as a sort of sail and was swerving back
and forth in the canal. And we know from some of the evidence that's come out in legal proceedings, that there was an argument on the bridge between the two Egyptian pilots. They were arguing about
speed, the weather. And we know that when the captain tried to get in the middle of the
argument and calm things down, one of the Egyptian pilots
threatened to leave the ship, leave his post. At some point, as the vessel was swerving back and forth, one of the pilots,
according to what we know from the voyage data recorder, gave the order to go full ahead. And that would have taken the Ever Given's speed to about 13 knots. And speeding up is supposed
to give you more control. It gives you more purchase on the rudder when you're trying to steer
one of these enormous ships. And in normal circumstances, that would be a good
way to regain control. But, the situation at that moment, it was the worst thing they could've done because the ship is in
such a narrow channel that increasing the speed
actually, conversely, can make it much harder to control because of something called
Bernoulli's Principle. And the basic idea is that
as water rushes faster, or any fluid rushes faster,
the pressure decreases. And because there's less pressure, the vessel is sucked toward
one bank or the other. That then became a problem as the captain, and the helm, and the bridge crew, fought to keep control of the vessel. There were, according to what we know from the voyage data recorder, orders given in rapid
succession from the pilots to go hard to port or hard to starboard. So eventually one of these
turns went past the point where it could be recovered, and the bow of the Ever Given
lodged right into the sand. The ship just slows down, and then suddenly you
realize you've crashed. So the Ever Given was stuck in one of the southern reaches of the canal, quite close to the southern entrance. Now, the Suez has been
expanded over the years. Most recently in 2015. Critically, those
expansions have been aimed at allowing two-way
traffic, for the most part. Because, originally, the
canal was only wide enough for vessels to go in
one direction at once. However, where the Ever Given was stuck was a one-way section, there
was no bypass around it. Somehow when they crashed, they managed to not only wedge
the front into the deserts, but the back of the ship
also grounded as well. So the ship was left diagonally wedged, completely blocking the channel. By the end of the first day, there would've been a
hundred or so vessels anchored waiting to transit. And that number grew
steadily hour by hour. Every day, goods worth $10 billion were arriving at the canal
waiting to go through. Look around you in any room
you happen to be in right now, the vast majority of
the objects in that room will have come to you on boats. And if you live in Western Europe, if you live in North America, it is very likely that those boats pass through the Suez Canal. So every company that
deals with physical stuff depends on this waterway
in one fashion or another. So having it blocked is just a titanically important problem. And one that there were
billions of dollars riding on resolving quickly. The 400-meter long cargo
ship, the Ever Given, is stuck in the Suez Canal. And it is fouling up global trade. 50 ships a day normally
pass through the canal, carrying 12% of the world's trade. So the pressure is really
on to get her refloated. The ship crashed at such
speed that the front went six or seven meters
directly into quite rocky sand. Two tug boats arrived very quickly. They were just routine tug boats, they weren't especially large or powerful. But they immediately made
efforts to pull the ship free. And it didn't move an inch. It was clear it was firmly stuck. The main entity with responsibility
for clearing the canal and freeing the ship is
the Suez Canal Authority, which is the Egyptian government entity that controls the canal. And the man in charge
of the pilots at least is the chief pilot, Captain El-Sayed. And he was one of the first on the scene. And he, with his boss, chairman Rabie, put together a plan to
try and get the ship free. Initially they realized
that that simply pulling probably wasn't going to be enough. They would have to dig as well. The front of the ship was
wedged so deep in the bank that they would need to do some digging. One of the earliest photos we have is of a small yellow excavator, right up against the front of the ship, just scooping out scoop
after scoop of sand. And you know, it looks ridiculous next to the size of the
vessel, it looks hopeless. This somewhat anonymous Egyptian guy became a global internet celebrity when photos of this went viral. Just a kind of metaphor for
being stuck in a hopeless task. The vessel's owners quite quickly hired a Dutch firm called Smit, who are one of the most prominent salvage
firms in the world. So a team of experts from Smit flew in, from the Netherlands and elsewhere, and see if there was a way that they could help get this ship off. Salvage teams are awarded a percentage of whatever they save, generally. There are different ways to pay them, but that's the traditional fashion. Now, if you're a salvage
crew and you save a big, fully-loaded oil tanker,
for example, from sinking, you could be in line for
tens of millions of dollars. So the team from Smit arrived
on the morning of March 25th. So that's about two days
after the grounding. The view of these
salvage experts from Smit was that preparations needed
to be made immediately to begin bringing containers
off, hiring a crane, coming up with a plan
to offload these big, very heavy boxes, in order
to lighten the vessel. Now, there were some people
at the Suez Canal Authority, is our understanding, who were more reluctant to consider that option. I think they worked out
it was gonna take months to completely offload the
containers from the Ever Given. So they were facing a much longer delay, and a much longer blockage,
if they had to try and take the containers off. So the compromise that was arrived at was towing would proceed until the time that a crane arrived. And then, if at that point,
the vessel was still stuck, they would begin unloading it. In a situation where every
day the canal is closed costs the world economy
billions of dollars, no one felt they had time to wait. On the 28th of March, that was a Sunday, you had two very powerful
tugs turn up from the south. Combined had something like 200 or 300 tons of pulling power. The tide is, of course, very important. You want more water,
that means more buoyancy, more ability to lift the ship clear of whatever it's stuck on. There was actually, at the
end of March, a supermoon, a time when the moon is
unusually close to Earth. Tidal peaks are higher. So if you happen to be trying to get a 400 meter container
ship off of a sandy bank, that's potentially quite important because you have more water to work with. So everyone knew that
March 28th to March 29th was the best opportunity
for weeks that the salvers were going to have to
pull the Ever Given clear. There was no sudden movement or noise. They just suddenly realized their tugs, instead of treading water, were moving, and they were moving because the back had very slowly started to
move away from the bank. So the rear was freed first,
but the front was still wedged. One of the worries was that when the bow did finally come free, it would swing clear across the canal. First of all, potentially
doing terrible damage to anyone who was in
the way, which included lots of vessels from the
Suez Canal Authority, and potentially also swinging right into the opposite bank, grounding itself again. So during the towing operations, the crew of the Ever
Given had helped set up cables from the bow of their
vessel to shore, four in total, so that when the bow
did finally come clear, it could be held from swinging
right across the canal. Smit came up with an idea
to take on ballast water into the ballast tanks of
the rear of the Ever Given. The back is pushed down and the front is lifted ever so slightly. That slight lift of the
front turned out to be just enough to help them
lift out of the sand. So when the tide changed, and the waters were flowing out, and the two powerful tugs were pulling in the same direction, that was when the front
finally came clear. And when that happened,
everything happened quite quickly. There was jubilation, as you can imagine. They all sounded their
horns at the same time, it could be heard from miles away. One of the Egyptian dredges was cheering and shouting number one, number one. So once the Ever Given was free, it was towed up to the Great Bitter Lake, which is a body of water
partway up the canal. And it sat there during what became a pretty tense legal standoff. You had the Suez Canal Authority, which is part of the Egyptian government, demanding compensation
of more than $900 million in exchange for letting the vessel go. Now, the Egyptians
claimed that part of this was a so-called salvage award, which is the percentage of value that you're entitled to
when you rescue a vessel. Part was also for what amounted
to reputational damages. The owners of the Ever Given, and frankly, a lot of people observing
this around the world, thought that figure was absurd. The Egyptian government reduced
their ask to 550 million. I think it's probably a safe bet that the settlement came
in somewhat below that, but we just don't know. In any case, it is a great deal of money. One of the amazing things about shipping is that it's kind of
invisible to most of us. The ships have become too
big for ports in Manhattan, or in East London, so the
ports have moved elsewhere. So actually, shipping has
kind of receded from view. But in that time, it has
become an even more important part of our lives than ever before. Everything we depend on,
all the material goods, all the energy, all the
oil we put in our cars, everything we shop for at a
place like Ikea or Walmart, it all comes on ships. For about a week, the whole
world was riveted by shipping, and also understood in some
ways how fragile it is. And all it took was one
wrong turn, effectively, for that to all be shut down.
