Almost a week after becoming an Empire State Building-sized obstruction in the Suez Canal, the giant container ship Ever Given was partially refloated early Monday, shipping authorities and observers said, as global markets anticipated the reopening of one of the world’s busiest waterways.
The 200,000-ton vessel — a so-called ultra-large container ship — ran aground Tuesday, its front and back ends getting jammed into the canal’s opposite banks amid high winds and a sandstorm. Since then, a salvage operation involving tugboats, dredgers, engineers and divers has worked around the clock to free the Ever Given from its sandy embrace.
Overnight Sunday, 10 tugboats pulled the ship from four different directions, the Egyptian state-run Suez Canal Authority said. But it was the tide, drawn by a full moon, that may have proven to be the decisive factor: At about 4:30 a.m. local time, with water levels rising in the area, the mega-ship was “successfully refloated,” said Inchcape Shipping, a marine services firm.
“She is being secured at the moment. More information about next steps will follow once they are known,” the company said in a statement.
Lt. Gen. Osama Rabie, chief of the Suez Canal Authority, said Monday that the ship had responded to the tugboats’ maneuvers, forcing what he said was a “restoration of 80% of the vessel’s direction” and swinging the stern of the vessel so that it now was roughly 332 feet from the western bank of the canal.
The tugboats were set to try to free the Ever Given further at 11:30 a.m., Rabie said, when the tide would rise once more and allow crews to try to coax the ship into the center of the navigational passageway.
Vesselfinder, a ship-tracking service, also showed a change in the Ever Given’s orientation.
Leth Agencies, which offers services to ships transiting the canal, tweeted that projections of “fully refloating” the ship “looked promising,” but it later added that the bow was still aground.
Videos shared on social media showed tugboats blaring their horns in raucous celebration as the Ever Given — looming like a mammoth among chihuahuas — appeared to swing out into the canal.
But experts said major challenges remained.
“Don’t cheer too soon,” Peter Berdowski, CEO of the Dutch salvage firm Boskalis, told Dutch radio. “The good news is that the stern is free, but we saw that as the simplest part of the job.”
Another video taken a few hours later showed the Ever Given having been shifted to the eastern bank of the canal and no longer completely plugging the channel. But it was unclear when traffic could restart, a $10-billion question — the approximate value of goods traversing the canal every day — that has grown in urgency over the past week.
Under normal circumstances, more than 50 ships per day bearing more than 10% of the world’s cargo — from tea to TVs, livestock to furniture — traverse the 120-mile waterway linking the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. By Monday morning, about 370 vessels were waiting at the Suez Canal’s southern and northern entrances, Leth Agencies said.
That backup included ships carrying oil and gas shipments crucial for several Middle Eastern countries. On Saturday, Syria’s oil ministry said the government would start rationing fuel until the Ever Given was freed. Lebanon, too, is waiting for a Kuwaiti tanker set to deliver gas oil to one of the country’s major power plants, local media reported on Friday.
The prospect of a breakthrough in the crisis couldn’t come too soon for the global economy. With the canal blocked, ships would have to voyage around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, adding anywhere from 12 to 21 days to the journey and tens of thousands of dollars in extra fuel costs. For Egypt, it would mean a major loss of foreign currency from its operation of the canal, which in 2020 generated about $5.61 billion in revenue.
The effort to dislodge the Ever Given has become a national rallying cry in Egypt, with the usually stodgy Facebook page of the Suez Canal Authority inundated with comments from residents in solidarity with the government agency. On Monday morning, the hashtag #Suez_Canal_Heroes was making the rounds.
