It’s a new week, but authorities have yet to find a new solution to the ongoing blockage at Egypt’s Suez Canal.
The Suez Canal …
It’s a new week, but authorities have yet to find a new solution to the ongoing blockage at Egypt’s Suez Canal. The Suez Canal is one of the world’s most important waterways. Located 75 miles east of Cairo, the capital, it links the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, allowing for direct shipping from Europe to Asia. Roughly 12% of the world’s shipping traffic and a chunk of its oil supply goes through the manmade canal, which has become particularly vital following pandemic-related disruptions to shipping. If the canal’s cargo traffic is disrupted, that means delays in everything from oil to food to clothing to semiconductors. Which is why it’s a big deal that a 1,312-foot-long cargo ship called Ever Given has become stuck across the Suez Canal. With the waterway blockage entering its sixth day and attempts to move the cargo ship unsuccessful thus far, the fallout is reverberating around the world. The Ever Given is still very much stuck. The latest update, per AP News, is that two additional tugboats have been deployed to help extract the 200,000-ton ship. It joins a fleet of around eight similar boats that have been on the job since Tuesday morning, when the Ever Given became lodged in the canal’s embankments and the saga began. At the same time, the Suez Canal Authority has onland heavy machinery working to dig around the ship’s bow, which would make it easier for the vessel to be pulled out. The weekend also brought a brief moment of optimism, as nine tugboats were able to budge the Ever Given, according to Osama Rabie of the SCA. That did not lead to the ship’s refloating, however. Authorities have been working to extract the vessel for nearly a week. Time is of the essence here. Experts say a couple days of delay would be a major inconvenience for shipping companies, but that a week or more of delays could prove catastrophic and not just for shipping companies. „If the ship were to remain stuck for another week it could cause massive delays in the delivery of products, and every second of delay leaves billions of dollars‘ worth of disruptions on the line,“ said Jennifer Bisceglie, CEO of supply chain risk management firm Interos. Peter Berdowski, CEO of Boskalis, the company leading the rescue effort, has cautioned that the Ever Given being stuck for weeks is a very real possibility. „We can’t exclude it might take weeks, depending on the situation,“ Berdowski told the Dutch television program Nieuwsuur. „It is like an enormous beached whale. It’s an enormous weight on the sand.
