Two additional tugboats yesterday sped to Egypt’s Suez Canal to aid efforts to free a skyscraper-sized container ship wedged for days across the crucial waterway, even as major shippers increasingly divert their boats out of fear the vessel might take even longer to free.
Syria has begun rationing the distribution of fuel in the country amid concerns of delays of shipments arriving amid the blockage.
The massive MV Ever Given, a Panama-flagged, Japanese-owned ship that carries cargo between Asia and Europe, got stuck on Tuesday in a single-lane stretch of the canal.
Photo: AP
In the time since, authorities have been unable to remove the vessel and traffic through the canal — valued at more than US$9 billion a day — has been halted, further disrupting a global shipping network already strained by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Dutch-flagged Alp Guard and the Italian-flagged Carlo Magno, called in to help tugboats already there, reached the Red Sea near the city of Suez early yesterday, satellite data from MarineTraffic.com showed.
The tugboats would nudge the 400m-long Ever Given as dredgers continue to vacuum up sand from underneath the vessel and mud caked to its port side, said Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement Pte Ltd, which manages the Ever Given.
Workers yesterday planned to make two attempts to free the vessel coinciding with high tides, a top pilot with the canal authority said.
“Sunday is very critical,” the pilot said. “It will determine the next step, which highly likely involves at least the partial offloading of the vessel.”
Taking containers off the ship would likely add even more days to the canal’s closure, something authorities have been desperately trying to avoid.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has ordered preparations for lightening the cargo of the container ship, Suez Canal Authority head Lieutenant General Osama Rabei told Egypt’s Extra News television channel.
He said officials had been in talks with the US about that possibility, without elaborating.
Rabei on Saturday told journalists that strong winds were “not the only cause” for the Ever Given running aground, appearing to push back against conflicting assessments offered by others.
He said an investigation was ongoing, but did not rule out human or technical error.
Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement said that their “initial investigations rule out any mechanical or engine failure as a cause of the grounding.”
However, at least one initial report suggested a “blackout” struck the hulking vessel carrying about 20,000 containers at the time of the incident.
Rabei said he remained hopeful that dredging could free the ship without having to resort to removing its cargo, but added that “we are in a difficult situation, it’s a bad incident.”
Asked about when they expected to free the vessel and reopen the canal, he said: “I can’t say, because I do not know.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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