Giant container ship blocks the Suez Canal, snarling global trade
The Ever Given ran aground and wedged across one of the world's busiest waterways, holding up hundreds of vessels and billions of dollars in cargo a day.
One of the world's largest container ships ran aground in the Suez Canal on Tuesday, turning sideways and wedging itself across the narrow waterway in a way that blocked all traffic through one of the most important arteries of global trade.
The Ever Given, a 400-metre vessel nearly as long as the Empire State Building is tall, lost control in high winds and a dust storm while transiting the canal, which connects the Mediterranean and Red Seas and carries roughly 12 percent of world trade. Within a day, a growing queue of ships carrying oil, consumer goods and raw materials began to pile up at both ends.
Salvage crews worked around the clock for nearly a week, using dredgers to remove sand from around the bow and a fleet of tugboats to try to pull the ship free. The blockage held up an estimated billions of dollars of cargo each day and forced some vessels to begin the long detour around the southern tip of Africa.
The incident laid bare the fragility of global supply chains that depend on a handful of chokepoints, and came at a time when the pandemic had already strained shipping and pushed up freight costs.
The ship was finally refloated after engineers took advantage of a high tide, and traffic resumed. But the saga of the stuck ship, which captivated the world and spawned endless jokes online, became a lasting lesson in how a single mishap could ripple across the global economy.