Peter Berdowski, chief executive of Boskalis, the salvage firm hired to extract the Ever Given, said the company hoped to pull the container ship free within days using a combination of heavy tugboats, dredging and high tides. Since the blockage began, a maritime traffic jam had grown to more than 320 vessels waiting on both ends of the Suez Canal and in the Great Bitter Lake in the middle of the waterway.
Some 9,000 tons of ballast water had been already removed from the vessel, the canal chairman said. It said about a dozen tugboats were working Saturday alongside dredging operations that were removing sand and mud from around the left side of the vessel’s bow. Two attempts to free the vessel failed Saturday, according to Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, the ship’s management company, and a canal services provider, Leth agencies, despite hopes that a high tide might give the vessel a boost.īernhard Schulte had said earlier that “significant progress” was made late Friday at the ship’s stern where its rudder was released from sediment. A Dutch salvage firm is attempting to refloat the vessel with tugboats and dredgers, taking advantage of high tides.
Rabei said he could not predict when the ship might be dislodged. The massive vessel got stuck in a single-lane stretch of the canal, about 3.7 miles north of the southern entrance, near the city of Suez. The Ever Given, a Panama-flagged ship that carries cargo between Asia and Europe, ran aground in the narrow canal that runs between Africa and the Sinai Peninsula. Osama Rabei told a news conference Saturday that an investigation was ongoing but did not rule out human or technical errors. Meanwhile, the head of the Suez Canal Authority said strong winds were “not the only cause” for the Ever Given running aground on Tuesday, appearing to push back against conflicting assessments offered by others. A giant container ship remained stuck sideways in Egypt’s Suez Canal for a fifth day Saturday as authorities made new attempts to free the vessel and reopen the crucial waterway.
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