A specialist US Navy team is heading to the Suez Canal to to advise local authorities attempting to free the gigantic container ship that has been stuck there for days.
The massive Ever Given, a Panama-flagged, Japanese-owned ship that carries cargo between Asia and Europe, got stuck Tuesday in a single-lane stretch of the canal. In the time since, authorities have been unable to remove the vessel and traffic through the canal — valued at over US$9 billion ($11.78 billion) a day — has been halted, further disrupting a global shipping network already strained by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Egyptian government agreed to accept an offer of help by American military dredging experts relayed through the US Embassy in Cairo.
"The Biden administration is tracking the situation closely. As part of our active dialogue with Egypt, we have offered US assistance to Egyptian authorities to help re-open the canal. We are consulting with our Egyptian partners about how we can best support their efforts," a US official said.
Two additional tugboats sped on Sunday to the Suez Canal to aid efforts to free the Ever Given, even as major shippers increasingly divert their boats out of fear the vessel may take even longer to free.
The Dutch-flagged Alp Guard and the Italian-flagged Carlo Magno, called in to help tugboats already there, reached the Red Sea near the city of Suez early Sunday, satellite data from MarineTraffic.com showed. The tugboats will nudge the 400-metre-long Ever Given as dredgers continue to vacuum up sand from underneath the vessel and mud caked to its port side, said Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, which manages the Ever Given.
Workers planned to make two attempts on Sunday to free the vessel coinciding with high tides, a top pilot with the canal authority said.
"Sunday is very critical," the pilot said. "It will determine the next step, which highly likely involves at least the partial offloading of the vessel."
