Ever Given has been released. Traffic in the Suez Canal resumes. This was announced by the authority that controls the channel.
“Live: successful efforts to put the Panamanian container ship back on the water” Ever Given, the Suez Canal Authority wrote on its Facebook page, showing images showing the ship from behind relative to the center of the waterway, surrounded by from boats both to his right and to his left. “Admiral Osama Rabie, president of the Suez Canal Authority, has proclaimed the resumption of navigation traffic in the canal”, reads again.
The container ship, after an attempt to free it, was again diagonal, blocking the channel again,
This morning the situation seemed to have been unlocked.
Smit Salvage, the Dutch company that is participating in the release of the Ever Given container ship in Suez, said the hardest part of the operation was yet to come. “The good news is that the stern of the ship is free, but this is in our opinion the simplest part: the challenge remains to free the front of the ship”, explained the executive director of Royal Boskalis, Smit Salvage’s parent company, to Dutch public radio. The top manager who supported the thesis and Peter Berdowski. Smit Salvage is a Rotterdam-based company that participated in the removal of both the wreck of the Costa Concordia that sank in front of the Giglio Island in 2012, emptying its tanks, and that of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk in 2001 following the accident of the year first.
“MV Ever Given was successfully resurfaced at 04:30 am,” a tweet from global offshore service provider ‘Inchcape Shipping’ opened the day. Vasselfinder ship tracking site changed Ever Given’s status to “under way” by reporting a “position” received at 06:05 Uct (therefore 04:05 Italian time).
Ever Given has been “reoriented for 80% in the right direction”: the director of the Suez Canal Authority, Osama Rabie, announced in a statement. “The stern … has been moved 102 meters from the shore”, from its previous position which was four meters from the shore, the note continues.
“The prospects for a full buoyancy of Ever Given look promising”, so in a tweet a company providing services for the canal, Leth Agencies, indicating that the Italian tugboat ‘Carlo Magno’ and the Dutch one ‘Alp Guard’ are ” arrived and are working in the area “.
Admiral Osama Rabie, the head of the Canal Authority, “sent a message of reassurance to the international maritime community, indicating that the navigation movement will resume once the container ship is fully buoyant and is conducted (…) in the region of the lakes “inside the Canal” for a technical review “.
It will take “three and a half days” after the end of operations around the Ever Given to clear the maritime traffic that was created in the Suez Canal due to the accident., The head of the Authority announced on local TV.
Rabie “congratulated the heroes of the Suez Canal Authority who have done this great work, appreciating their efforts during the period just ended and having fulfilled their national duty to the fullest”: the Authority writes on Facebook, adding that the admiral expressed “his full confidence in the completion of the work at 100%”.
The Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al Sisi, praised on Twitter the “successful” operation to free the Suez Canal from the Ever Given ship. “Today the Egyptians have managed to put an end to this crisis – reads the tweet – despite the enormous technical complexity” of the situation. Sisi then ensured that, thanks to “Egyptian hands”, the passage of goods and merchandise will be guaranteed “to the whole world”.
Ever Given had been blocked since Tuesday diagonally across the canal, completely obstructing the watercourse of about 300 meters in width, one of the busiest in the world. The approximately 190 km long Suez Canal handles about 10% of international maritime trade and each day it is shut down causes significant delays and costs. In total, nearly 400 ships remained stuck at the ends and center of the channel connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, according to the Suez Canal Authority. At least a dozen tugs and dredgers to suck sand from under the ship were mobilized during the operation.
