Traffic Suspended, Ships Stuck
The Suez Canal Authority today announced that Traffic Through the Canal is Suspended.
Chairman and Managing Director of the Suez Canal Authority has announced today; Thursday March 25th, 2021, that navigation through the Suez Canal is temporarily suspended. That is only until the floatation works of the large Panamanian container vessel EVER GIVEN; that ran aground at the 151 km area (Canal Marking), are complete.
The Ever Given is stuck sideways in the canal blocking all passage.
Previously, the Suez Authority’s plan was to allow 13 ships in the canal to move through a smaller channel. The plan now is to first free the Ever Given.
In addition to the 13 ships stuck in the canal, hundreds of ships float outside the canal awaiting passage.
With each passing hour, global supply chain disruptions mount.
Might Take ‘Days, Even Weeks’ to Free
Global supply chains are seriously disrupted as the “Ever Given” Might take Days, Even Weeks, to Free
Eight large tugboats were attempting to push and drag the ship from its unintended berth, the Suez Canal Authority said in a statement on Thursday, but at about 1,300 feet long — roughly equivalent to the height of the Empire State Building — and weighing around 200,000 metric tons, dislodging the Ever Given is proving challenging.
An attempt to extract the ship at around 8 a.m. on Thursday did not succeed, forcing salvagers to try again later in the day, the ship’s technical manager, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, said in a statement on Thursday. The company said that a specialized suction dredger had arrived to help dig the ship out.
Peter Berdowski, chief executive of Royal Boskalis Westminster, which has been appointed by Ever Given’s owner to help move the vessel, told the Dutch current affairs program Nieuwsuur on Wednesday that the operation to free the ship could take “days, even weeks.”
Mr. Berdowski, whose company has been involved in expanding the Suez Canal, said that Ever Given was stuck on both shallow sides of the V-shaped waterway. Fully loaded with 20,000 containers, the ship “is a very heavy beached whale,” he said.
Mr. Berdowski said that the Ever Given, operated by a company called Evergreen, was too heavy for tugboats alone, adding that salvagers might need to extract fuel, pump out water from the ballast tanks and remove some of the containers to make the ship lighter and therefore easier to move. And the dredging may require extra equipment, he said.
‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’
Global supply chains were already under pressure before the Ever Given blocked the canal.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Lars Mikael Jensen, head of Global Ocean Network at A.P. Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company. “All the links in the supply chain are stretched. The ships, the trucks, the warehouses.”
- Off the coast of Los Angeles, more than two dozen container ships filled with exercise bikes, electronics and other highly sought imports have been idling for as long as two weeks.
- In Kansas City, farmers are struggling to ship soybeans to buyers in Asia. In China, furniture destined for North America piles up on factory floors.Every container that cannot be unloaded in one place is a container that cannot be loaded somewhere else.
- Empty containers are piled up at ports in Australia and New Zealand; containers are scarce at India’s port of Kolkata, forcing makers of electronics parts to truck their wares more than 1,000 miles west to the port of Mumbai, where the supply is better.
- Rice exporters in Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia are forgoing some shipments to North America because of the impossibility of securing containers.
“Everybody wants everything,” said Akhil Nair, vice president of global carrier management at SEKO Logistics in Hong Kong. “The infrastructure can’t keep up.”
Over 100 Ships Backed Up as Vessel Stuck in Suez Canal Sideways
Yesterday, I noted Over 100 Ships Backed Up as Vessel Stuck in Suez Canal Sideways
The prognosis has gotten worse.
Supply Chain Disruptions Mount
- Car and computer makers are straining from a global chip shortage, exacerbated by a fire in a big chip-making factory in Japan last week.
- Car makers have closed plants after a Texas cold snap earlier last month hit plastics production
- California ports have been hit by backlogs and delays.
Pilot Error
The ship got stuck attempting to navigate the canal in extremely high winds.
“Piloting ships such as this in wind conditions outside accepted operating parameters is a recipe for disaster,” said Gregory Tylawsky, a ship captain with the Maritime Expert Group based in Santa Rosa, Calif.
Assessing the Blame
The captain of the Ever Given appears to have made a huge error attempting to navigate the Suez Canal in high winds.
However, the Canal Authorities should not have permitted passage in the first place.
This line of thought assumes the winds were too strong for safe passage before the ship entered the canal (or reasonably known to become so).
If so, the Canal Authorities are more responsible than the captain of the ship.
Alternatively, if this was a sudden, unpredicted wind storm and the captain made no navigation mistakes, then this incident is just an unfortunate accident.
Blame aside, the disruptions are serious and mounting.
Mish
Oh the unfortunate irony of this low brow humor. Boat charted cock n balls map hours before blocking canal. Dick move.
My instinct says fake news, but I can’t find any telltale signs of it being fake.
Long term, the canal needs to be widened. Panama just had a major upgrade to handle larger ships.
Canal pilots were on the Ever Given.
The challenges of navigating a canal means ships are required to have a canal pilot come aboard, someone who knows the canal and pilots it through
There is an excellent explanation of the hydrodynamics in shallow water and the bank effect here (which also implies its well and truly stuck)
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
That remains murky. The vessel entered the canal from the Red Sea on Tuesday morning and ran aground 45 minutes later.
The ship’s operator and Egyptian officials blamed winds gusting as much as 50 kilometers per hour (30 miles per hour), along with a sandstorm sweeping the area.
Cargo ships have grown in recent years to take on more containers as fuel prices have risen because big boats burn less fuel per container moved. Some have wondered if the ultra-large size of the Ever Given was a factor.
While the supersize of ships can increase their risk of running aground in the Suez Canal, boats just as big buffeted by winds just as strong have passed through the waterway without incident before.
Instead, it’s likely that “a combination of factors” was at play, said Ian Woods, a marine cargo lawyer and partner with the firm Clyde & Co.
“There’s the exposure to the elements, potential for a loss of power, potential for steering problems,” Woods said. “We’d expect a full investigation.”
Hello,
Though technically the captain (generally referred to in Marine Industry (MI) terms as the “Master”) would be held responsible for a ‘pilotage’ error this would not be strictly correct. When MI folks say ‘pilotage’ they are referring to a very specific kind of ‘navigation’; i.e. navigation in restricted waters with a ‘pilot’ at the helm. The ‘pilot’ would be an employee or agent of the local pilotage authority (channel, lock, harbour, passage, port authority) which may require all ship’s of a certain size to take on a pilot to navigate through waterways under their authority. Though the ‘Master’ of the ship is technically in command of the vessel at all times and the ‘pilot’ is under the Master’s command this in no way absolves the pilot or the authority of liability in the event of an accident. The specific circumstances of the incident would be investigated by 2 parties; the flag state’s and the port state’s investigating body. Things get even trickier when insurance policies, shipping contracts (contracts of carriage) and the nationalities of the seafarer’s involved plus the home country of the ship’s agents (or owner reps) are factored in. Bottom line ; 100 Marine lawyers worldwide just had multiple simultaneous orgasms 🙂
It s obvious again, judging by the comments here : ‘the best helmsmen are always on shore’ …( a well known dutch proverb btw)
For the mentally ill Qanon, it all has meaning…
…..Followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory trying to find meaning behind the blocking of the Suez Canal by a cargo ship claim that the vessel is being used by Hillary Clinton for child sex trafficking.
Some supporters of the radical movement are suggesting the 400-meter-long Ever Given currently stuck in Egypt is being used to abuse children on behalf of the cabal of pedophiles that they believe runs the U.S.
Others claim the children held captive on the ship will be revealed to the world live on camera, justifying their beliefs.
In order to jump to this wild conclusion, QAnon supporters point to the vessel’s operator, a Taiwan-based shipping company called Evergreen Marine Corporation. Clinton was given the Secret Service codename “Evergreen” when her husband Bill Clinton was president.
The ship’s call sign is H3RC—the same three letters as the initials of the 2016 presidential candidate….
off your pills again ?
Why do dems have such a fixation on QAnon? I have many republican friends and none of them even know what QAnon is.
because its so damn absurd. its not even political its about pedophiles. i think the better question is why doesnt everyone have a fixation on this? lol.a huge portion of the population believes an insane story based on some very flimsy logic and in some cases not logical at all. Its only considered political because clinton seems to have landed in the middle of it. which is not logical, because if this really existed anyone running it with half a brain would be far from a public figure like clinton.
how can your friends ot know what qanon is at this point? even if you think its the dumbest thing on the planet if you call yourself a republican you have to be paying attention at least close enough to be aware of what it is.
What really amazes me is that, no matter how very busy the Suez channel is, merely a trivial 1trillion $ of goods are passing through it on a annual basis…..what it DOES show is, how extremely mind boggling a 28 Trillion (and ruthlessly ticking) of sovereign debt actually is….. Don’ t it ?
Don’t you worry about Belgiums debt per capita?
oh yes I do but that doesn’t make US numbers less impressive, does it? …and when it comes to it, the ECB will bail us out, staunch, all time member as we are….
The FED can bail us out too. Just expand their balance sheet by $20t and mop up all the t-bills.
…and 0 inflation…Right ! It only takes half a braincell to realise this situation is unsustainable…. and yes, it might and probably will go on for another couple of years, so put them all in , your chips, and buy the dips …
They should deal with it like Oregon dealt with a beached whale in 1970.
Can’t they just add water to the canal? Isn’t that how canals work?
It has no locks, it’s just an open passage between the red sea and mediterranean. I suppose they could dam it temporarily and pump in water, but probably more hassle than it’s worth.
NYT article overviews the canal here. it was closed down for almost 10 years after the 1967 Israel/Arab war. The world still worked.
Hmmm. What amount of “hassle” is it worth?
What amount of “hassle” is it worth?
Building a temporary unloading terminal and then unloading the ship in the middle of nowhere?
Digging a bypass canal?
risking capsizing the vessel by removing fuel and ballast?
Blow it up to clear the canal?
Damming the canal to temp. raise the water level is the best idea I’ve heard so far.
You might be on to something.
This is going to raise prices globally and stress an already over-stressed world economy.
No hassle too great IMO.
What a wonderful real world example of a single point of failure causing a huge system to collapse!
Collapse is an overstatement.
…[Evert Lataire, head of the Maritime Technology Division at Ghent University in Belgium] wrote his dissertation on a similar phenomenon as a ship passes close to a bank: the bank effect. The water speeds up, the pressure drops, the stern pulls into the bank and, particularly in shallow water, the bow gets pushed away. Stern one way, bow the other. A boat that had been steaming is suddenly spinning. It’s a well-identified phenomenon; in 2009 Ghent University’s Shallow Water Knowledge Centre put together a whole conference about it. Clever pilots on the Elbe, according to Lataire, will use it to shoot around a bend. However: the more water a ship displaces, the stronger the effect. And the closer the side of the hull is to the shore, the stronger the effect. The bigger the ship, the faster the bow shoots away from the bank.… [On the video,] everything happens quickly, in a way that looks a lot like the bank effect. Bow shoots away from the bank. Stern continues to hug the bank and move north. Ship spins. Bow bulb punches through the riprap.”…
I’ve been compelled to buy several bundles (1 = 49 8’x4′ sheets) of CDX grade plywood months in advance of when they are needed and store them at cost in a leased warehouse because I am scared they won’t be there when I need them, and that the immense realized inflation will continue at this pace for those months. Amazing what a “project that cannot be allowed to fail” can do to your decision making protocols during times like this.
Yes, I would call that a serious design flaw that both the captain and the canal authority should have been aware of.
Not sure stern thrusters would have helped. If the bow is blown towards the side of the canal then stern thrusters are only going to be used to realign via pushing the stern towards the side of the canal also. In a canal there just isn’t room to carry out maneuvers like that, I think the benefit might have been insignificant in this circumstance.
Anyway, stern thrusters don’t seem common on container ships and bulk carriers, so it’s not exactly a design flaw but standard setup.
More bow thrusters might have helped. The entire purpose of lateral thrust is to improve maneuvering in tight quarters…not to mention offsetting the effects of windage.
Feasibly, if it was a single gust of wind it could have been trimmed back into line with stern thrusters , but anything more and the ship would have just moved sideways. The ship is 400m long and not designed to be powered sideways , all the usual seaways and infrastructure are chosen or adapted to the needs of these ships (including other smaller craft that stay well out of their way) , not the other way round. Just canals are a bit narrow sometimes.
I have met these skyscraper ships in the open ocean while under sail…never one nearly that big though….but they scare the hell out of me from five miles away. Thank heaven we have AIS now. I can remember when we didn’t.
Question for you? Do ships usually power through the Suez Canal? I thought they were towed. I will admit I did not know that the Suez has no locks.
Thanks for sharing your nautical acumen. I’m just a sailor, not a merchant seaman.
As far as I know they always power through. I’m not sure if towing is even available, but you would think so – maybe by tug ?
These ships take miles to stop and they can barely turn, and even with all the regulations and the fact that they are hard not to spot they still run into each other occasionally. If I remember, they can be over the horizon and onto a small boat in under half an hour, which is one reason even the smallest yachts keep watch, even solo sailors often wake every so often to check, especially the more cautious, and because a small boat in a rough sea is hardly visible on radar even. There are stories.
So definitely fear is on the agenda, fortunately they tend to keep to shipping lanes as far as most sailors are concerned… unfortunately smaller craft tend to have to cross those quite often also.
The size of their engines…this is just the crankshaft…
Feasibly, if it was a single gust of wind it could have been trimmed back into line with stern thrusters, but anything more and the ship would have just moved sideways. The ship is 400m long and not designed to be powered sideways , all the usual seaways and infrastructure are chosen or adapted to the needs of these ships (including other smaller craft that stay well out of their way) , not the other way round. Just canals are a bit narrow sometimes.
(Repost as comments seems to have eaten previous same reply)
I’m not so sure. The purpose of the thrusters is to avoid the need for a tugboat in 50 mph winds I’m skeptical it would have made a difference. I’m seeing a lack of experts proclaiming pilot error. This us also a relatively new ship design.
This is not even the ship’s first wind related problem. They had one wind related collision in the past.
According to Wiki (thanks@Sechel ) the ship only has bow thrusters. A ship that size should have multiple bow and stern thrusters. You could call that a design flaw, but I’m sure it was built that way to save money.