![]() This helped loosen the bow and clear the ship’s stern from the sand bank.īut a high tide had failed to float the ship as expected. On 26 March, Evergreen Marine announced the plan was to “continue the ongoing efforts to clear sand and mud around the ship’s bow and try to free the vessel at high tide”.Īn additional specialist ‘suction dredger’ was brought in, which was able to move 2000 cubic metres of material every hour.īy Sunday 28 March, five days after the Ever Given got stuck, the dredging operation had removed more than 18,000 tonnes of sand and mud from under the ship. These are a familiar sight on the Suez Canal, according to Mercogliano, and are used to ensure the waterway remains navigable. With the initial attempts using tug boats failing, dredgers were brought in to dig mud and sand from under the bow and stern of the ship. The larger and heavier the vessel, the more force required by the tug boats to refloat the ship.” “Second, tug boats will apply sufficient horizontal force to overcome the static friction generated by whatever material the boat is resting upon. “First, salvage crews will work to increase the vessel’s vertical buoyancy force, which means the whole boat floats higher in the water,” he said. There are two basic approaches to refloating a grounded ship, according to Turnock. worse, catastrophically fracture the vessel in half, which would close the canal for months, if not years.” Initial attempts to dislodge the ship included using a digger to excavate the bow. “You could conceivably crack the hull, cause an oil spill. “What you can’t do is take a lot of weight off the ends and put a lot of what ‘sagging stress’ on the vessel,” he said. Moving the Ever Given was a complex operation, Mercogliano said, with “the bow basically in Asia, the stern in Africa, and the middle in the middle of the canal”. Smit represents the “special forces” of salvage teams, according to American maritime historian Sal Mercogliano. ![]() Initial attempts to dislodge the ship included using a digger to excavate the bow while tugboats worked to pull and push the vessel free.īut after two days of no movement, Dutch firm Smit Salvage, owned by Boskalis, was called in, along with Japanese firm Nippon Salvage. Īdverse weather conditions only added to the challenge of steering such a large vessel. “The scale has gotten so big that a lot of the infrastructure has yet to catch up with the size of the ship,” he told Popular Mechanics. The Ever Given is one of the world’s largest container ships, and Captain Morgan McManus from SUNY Maritime College said the push to build increasingly large vessels could be partly to blame for the incident. “Weather factors were not the main reasons for the ship’s grounding,” he said on Saturday, explaining “technical or human errors” may have played a role in the accident.Īn investigation into how the ship ran aground is now underway. ![]() “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.”īut the Chairman of the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) Osama Rabie offered an alternative version of events. “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,” he wrote. Writing for The Conversation, Professor of Maritime Fluid Dynamics at the University of Southampton Stephen Turnock said the ship’s containers, stacked high on the deck, were suspected to have caught a gust of wind like a sailboat’s sail. Initial reports blamed a sandstorm and strong winds for the blockage, with a recorded wind speed at the time of 40 knots. The Ever Given was carrying 18,000 containers when it became jammed diagonally across a southern section of the canal early on 23 March. under a Panamanian flag, the 200,000 t vessel was on its way to Rotterdam in the Netherlands from the Yantian district in China. ![]() Operated by Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen Marine Corp. It blocked one of the world’s busiest trade routes, ultimately preventing more than 300 vessels, including container ships and bulk carriers, from passing through the canal, which connects the Mediterranean and Red seas. The 400-metre-long ship - for comparison, the Eiffel Tower is just 324 m tall - became stuck in the mud and sand at the southern end of the canal this past Tuesday 23 March. The giant container ship Ever Given was successfully refloated almost a week after it became lodged in Egypt’s Suez Canal and disrupted the global shipping industry. ![]()
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