Uncertainty over unblocking the Suez Canal

(Cairo) Will it take a few days or a few weeks to unblock the Suez Canal? Efforts to free a 400-meter-long container vessel that had been stranded for four days on this difficult route for sea cargo continued on Friday, which was severely affected.

Bassem Aboulabas
France Media Agency

The company hired for “Rescue”Given anytime According to experts, traffic re-emption on the canal indicates “days or weeks” for the start, which is almost 10% pass in international maritime trade.

Reports from various quarters that high winds combined with the incident on Tuesday and the sandstorm have led to huge traffic jams.

According to the Specialist Journal Lloyd’s List, More than 200 ships are currently stranded at both ends and in the waiting area in the middle of the canal, causing a significant delay in the delivery of oil and other products, with a brief impact on black gold Wednesday prices.

Shipping giant Mersk and German Hapag-Lloyd on Thursday said they plan to divert their ships and sail for an additional 10 days around the Cape of Good Hope, the 9,000-kilometer detour and the African continent.

However, the total costs in the field of shipping goods in containers are high. According to Lloyd’s List, The lone container ship intercepts approximately 6 9.6 billion cargo per day.

Maybe “weeks”

The Egyptian Suez Canal Authority (SCA) has been trying to free the ship, which weighs more than 220,000 tonnes, since Wednesday.

“Tugs and dredges will be used to break the rocks,” boat owner Shoi Kisen Kaisha, an official with the Japanese company, told AFP.

According to the SCA, between 15,000 and 20,000 meters need to be cleared³ The sand reaches a depth of 12 to 16 meters and floats the ship.

The SCA announced Friday that dredgers have undertaken the 87% sand removal process.

Significantly higher tides than expected early next week will help technical teams unblock the ship.

According to the SCA, Egypt has received many offers of international assistance, especially from the United States.

Turkey has offered to send a tug to haul a container ship as Ankara has been struggling to pacify relations with Cairo since the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi in 2013. It is backed by Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s adviser on port matters, Mohab Mamish, told AFP on Thursday evening that navigation would resume “in a maximum of 48 to 72 hours”.

But, a few hours ago, the Dutch company Smit warned that the salvage operation could take “days, weeks”.

The company operating the ship called for a “more effective plan” to protect Taiwanese Evergreen Marine Corp, Smith Salvage and Japanese company Nippon Salvage. The first experts arrived on Thursday.

Schmidt Salvage has been involved in major relief efforts in recent years, in particular Costa Concordia, An Italian cruise ship, which sank from Tuscany in 2012, and over the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, in August 2000 with 118 people on board.

“Rare” events

According to the SCA, an average of 51.5 ships per day will use the canal by 2020 with about 19,000 ships.

According to a report by Alliance Global Corporate & Specialty, a marine safety insurance company, “Shipping incidents on the Suez Canal are extremely rare – a total of 75 shipping incidents have been reported in the last decade”.

According to British journalist Rose George, author of a book on shipping, the latter “still brings us 90% of everything. […] And we basically depend on it ”.

According to her, “two-thirds of marine accidents are caused by human error.”

But according to Russian embassy official Nikolai Korchunov, the blockade of the Suez Canal “highlighted above all the need for further development of the Northern Sea Route, the sea route in the Russian Arctic”. More viable due to climate change.