A giant container ship runs aground in the Suez Canal blocking all passage
The Ever Given ship, from the company Evergreen, blocks all passage through the Suez Canal, a very busy route in maritime transport, on March 24, 2021 © SUEZ CANAL AUTHORITY / Handout via REUTERS
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2 min
A super container ship has been blocking the Suez Canal from the night of Tuesday 23 to Wednesday 24 March, in Egypt.
The Taiwanese ship "Ever Given", 400 meters long and about sixty meters wide, got across the canal blocking all traffic in this very important waterway, used by 10% of all trade. global maritime.
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With our correspondent in Cairo,
Alexandre Buccianti
According to the company Evergreen which operates the ship, it would be a violent gust of wind that would have deviated the
Ever Given
from its trajectory.
The bulb of the bow sank into
the bank of the Canal
and the vessel turned on itself, until its stern touched the other bank.
Powerful tugs seek to pull the ship out of the embankment.
A complicated mission because the
Ever Given
is one of
the largest container ships
in the world, carrying 20,000 containers and weighing more than 200,000 tonnes.
Bottling of ships
The accident caused a traffic jam of more than a hundred ships in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, while, every day, 70 ships carrying a total of 4 million tonnes of goods cross the Canal.
An extension of the halt to navigation would have serious economic repercussions for Egypt.
Worse, it could divert some maritime traffic from the canal in the future.
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