On March 23, 2021, two years ago, the container ship Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal, preventing the passage of hundreds of ships, including several oil tankers, from both north and south along one of the busiest trade routes in the world. It took six days to clear it and reopen the Suez Canal to traffic, in which a series of delays accumulated for hundreds of ships that would only be disposed of months later.
Ever Given is a huge container ship managed by the Taiwanese company Evergreen Marine Corp: it is 400 meters long, 59 wide and has a tonnage of over 200,000 tons: when it ran aground it had left China and was headed for Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. Today, two years later, Ever Given has long since returned to sailing, and it is currently located in the port of Qindgao, China. In 2022, she traveled nearly 160,000 nautical miles (300,000 kilometers) and docked 42 times in port. She had already returned to sailing the Suez Canal in August 2021, a few months after the accident, which cost her company hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation.
The Ever Given ran aground at 7.40 local time (6.40 in Italy) on March 23, ending up getting sideways, occupying the entire width of the Channel. Initially the ship’s captain blamed the strong wind, which according to him had caused the vessel to heel. The meteorological data of that day confirmed that the wind could have influenced the accident but according to some experts, who based themselves on monitoring the Ever Given’s course, the ship was going too fast: 13 knots (about 25 km/h) against a maximum allowed in the Channel of 8.6 (about 16 km/h), and for this reason she would have run aground. It has also been argued that that speed had been reached precisely to try to counteract the force of the wind, however making the situation worse, because the size of the ship at that point would have made it unmanageable.
The container ship in the Suez Canal (Suez Canal Authority via AP)
Several tugboats immediately arrived on the spot and tried to drag the ship to straighten it, without success, and excavators who tried to free the bow from the sand. Within three days there was a queue of about 150 vessels stranded in both directions in the canal. It has been calculated that the economic losses in the six days that Ever Given was stranded were about 9 billion dollars a day (about 7.5 billion euros).
An excavator to try to free the keel from the sand (Suez Canal Authority via AP)
The Suez Canal, built in 1869, is one of the main links between Europe and Asia, connecting the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea, allowing shipping routes that would otherwise take many more days to circumnavigate Africa. It is 190 km long and 205 meters wide, and every day 30 percent of world container ship traffic passes through the Canal, which generally guarantees almost 7 percent of world merchant traffic.
After six days of work, also taking advantage of the high tide, the Ever Given was finally freed and brought back to a position parallel to the channel. At that point she began to move again, moving up to the Great Bitter Lake, one of the clearings of the Canal. There she was kidnapped by the Egyptian authorities, which own the Suez Canal, who blocked her until an agreement could be found for compensation for the damages caused by the blockade.
The negotiations with the Japanese company Shoei Kisen Kaisha Ltd., owner of the ship (which was managed by the Taiwanese Evergreen), lasted over three months: thethe first request of the authority, about 761 million euros, was rejected by Shoei Kisen, but the amount of the final agreement was never revealed. As part of the compensation, Egypt also received an impressive 75-ton tug from the Japanese company, which in the future could resolve similar situations in a shorter time.
After 100 days spent in the Suez Canal, Ever Given finally left again on 12 July and arrived twelve days later at its destination, in the port of Rotterdam, accumulating a further three days behind schedule: here it unloaded part of the 18,000 containers of goods it was transporting, completing delivery a few days later in the port of Felixstowe, UK.
On 6 August, after passing some checks, the return journey to China began, passing through the Suez Canal on 20 August. A month later she arrived in Qingdao, where she was anchored on a wharf large enough to allow for repairs: the keel had in fact been damaged up to the area of the bow thrusters.
So, what does it look like when you run your bow into Asia at 13 knots and close the Suez Canal for six days in March?#EverGiven pic.twitter.com/pIzAPNvZse
— Sal Mercogliano (WGOW Shipping) 🚢⚓🐪🚒🏴☠️ (@mercoglianos) November 2, 2021
After six weeks of repairs, Ever Given resumed her normal navigation: in the months following her running aground she became a sort of tourist attraction, much photographed in the various ports where she docked. Today it mostly travels on similar routes between China and the Netherlands.