Suez Canal stays blocked despite efforts to dislodge massive container ship

Efforts to dislodge a giant container ship from the Suez Canal continued as rescue teams tried to get traffic moving again in the one of the world’s most important waterways. The Ever Given, a container ship longer than the Eiffel Tower that ran aground in the southern part of the canal in Egypt, is still stuck in position, said Ahmed Mekawy, the deputy manager for the Suez Canal for GAC, a provider of port-agent services.

 

Traffic should resume today or tomorrow, Mekawy said earlier on Wednesday. He later said he’d received some wrong information about whether the ship had been moved, but it was unclear whether that affected this timetable.

 

The incident has left dozens of vessels gridlocked as they attempted to transit between the Red Sea and Mediterranean. Efforts to move the ship had appeared to be proceeding faster than initial warnings that traffic through the canal could be choked off for days. The Suez Canal Authority hasn’t yet commented on when traffic could resume.

 

The 193-kilometer-long (120 miles) Suez Canal is among the most trafficked waterways in the world, used by tankers shipping crude from the Middle East to Europe and North America. About 12 per cent of global trade and 8 per cent of liquefied natural gas pass through the canal, as do around 1 million barrels of oil each day.

 

The disruption comes at a time when oil prices were already volatile. Crude surged above $70 a barrel earlier this month on Saudi production cuts, only to slump close to $60 this week due to setbacks in Europe’s coronavirus vaccine program.