The Ever Given container ship has been unlocked and at least partially refloated. At 5:42 this morning, when it was still night, dozens of tugs blew their sirens in jubilation. However, the operations to free it completely are still in progress. The giant, according to the Egyptian authorities, “is almost completely free”.
We will have to wait until today to understand if the operation was fully successful, because the high tide of the full moon, at its maximum in the early hours after midnight, has now dropped and with it the water level in the Suez Canal.
A video posted on Twitter by the correspondent of the Emirati newspaper The National, Joyce Karam, shows the 220,000-ton ship partially straightened, with the bow that seems free. Huge dredges have sucked up almost twenty thousand tons of sand in recent days. According to naval officers engaged in the maneuver, cited by New York Times, the container ship, 400 meters long, double the width of the channel, “has regained buoyancy”. This means it can maneuver, albeit with the help of at least 14 tugs.
But now you have to straighten it completely to allow navigation and unlocking of the channel. There are over 300 merchant ships waiting and trafficking worth $ 9.6 billion is stopped every day. The Suez Canal is the most important trade route in the world, a bottleneck where 13 percent of all global traffic passes. The repercussions of the blockade are already being felt in oil supplies, with a rise in prices on international markets.