Traffic through the Suez Canal has returned to normal, according to the Canal Authority. Here the Huahine crosses the channel on March 30th in Ismailia, Egypt. Mahmoud Khaled / Getty Images hide subtitles
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Mahmoud Khaled / Getty Images
Traffic through the Suez Canal has returned to normal, according to the Canal Authority. Here the Huahine crosses the channel on March 30th in Ismailia, Egypt.
Mahmoud Khaled / Getty Images
Five days after a skyscraper container ship has been postponed From the Suez Canal, the backlog of ships waiting to cross the Egyptian waterway has been cleared up, according to the canal authority.
When the 1,312-foot Ever Given ship ran aground On March 23, it blocked canal traffic and brought shipping to a standstill on one of the busiest waterways in the world. During the six days that Ever Given was stuck, more than 400 ships were stranded on the artificial canal that connects the Mediterranean with the Red Sea.
But after a flotilla of tugs finally freed the ship on Monday, traffic was resumed. Late on Friday, the chairman of the Suez Canal Authority informed an Egyptian television station that the remaining 61 ships would cross the canal on Saturday.
Chairman Osama Rabie told MBC Masr that a total of 85 ships should sail in both directions on Saturday through the canal Reuters. The canal authority opened an investigation on Wednesday into what exactly led Ever Given to run aground and block the waterway. That investigation should be completed within two days, he said.
Experts say larger ships have been built in the past few decades as the demand for consumer goods has increased. The Ever Given the size of an Empire State Building is not an anomaly. more than 100 similar massive ships travel on the world’s waterways – with even bigger ones under construction.
Marine risk analysts have long warned of concerns about ever larger ships, Captain Andrew Kinsey, a senior marine risk advisor at Allianz, told NPR this week. “We have been trying for a long time to address the problem,” he said, calling the Ever Given incident “a warning” of things to come.
