The Inside Story of the Ship That Broke Global Trade

By the way, getting to Egypt was the most complicated thing I have ever had on a journalistic trip. It was the fact that when I arrived in Egypt, absolutely no one wanted to talk to me. Going to the Suez Canal, I visited the Suez Canal control tower and saw for myself how things worked. It was only by attending the court litigation in Ismailia and listening to the lawyers talk about the problems on the bridge that we learned all this new information. A giant container

ship

blocks the Suez Canal. One of the world's busiest waterways, the route is vital for the movement of everything from oil to consumer goods.

At first people blamed the strong winds, but you know, that was never a very satisfactory explanation, simply because the strong winds in that part of the world occurred for about half the year. Bad weather may not be the main reason the boat got stuck. It could have been a technical or human error. That will be revealed through the investigation. According to evidence presented to an Egyptian court, at one point the pilots were arguing, shouting at each other and exchanging insults. So if this lasts more than a day, it could cause major headaches for

global

ship

ping and energy markets.

Why did this situation occur in the first place? This ship is so big. She is as long as the Empire State Building is tall. And she is blocking the entire width of the Suez Canal since she ran aground on Tuesday. I think most of us are not aware of the extent to which

global

trade

hangs in the balance. Hello, my name is Kit and I'm a Bloomberg reporter. I thought it was essential to go to Egypt to report this

story

. I visited the Suez Canal Authority, spoke to the chief pilots. I attended a couple of court hearings and saw lawyers for the ship owners argue for the first time that there had been any fault at the hands of the Suez Canal pilots.

I'm Matthew Campbell. I'm a reporter and editor for Bloomberg Businessweek. So modern ships of all sizes have something called a voyage data recorder on the bridge. The idea is to capture audio of everything that happens. So in the case of the Ever Given, as in so many maritime accidents, the VDR evidence became really critical in determining what really happened. The urgent effort to dislodge a cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal, blocking a key global

trade

route. This is a jam like no other. There was this cascade of disruption to global trade, and so a lot of people could argue that they lost money as a result of what happened aboard the Ever Given in late March.

So what happened on the bridge, what was recorded by the VDR, becomes a matter of incredible sensitivity because it is simply crucial evidence. Boats, with a few exceptions, have gotten bigger and bigger over the last 30 or 40 years. The Ever Given, if you include the value of the ship, the value of the fuel on board and the 17,000 containers it was carrying, amounts to about $1 billion. This is one of the largest objects that humans have ever put into the ocean. There was a crew of 25 led by a captain named Krishnan Kanthavel, a very experienced sailor from Tamil Nadu.

He had sailed from Asia and was due to arrive in Rotterdam a couple of weeks later. In the Suez Canal, transit usually takes place early in the morning. The Ever Given would then have been emerging from the Red Sea and entering the Suez Canal. There were terrible winds at that time, whipping sand, a really strong storm. And in fact, there was enough wind that some boats decided they didn't want to go through the channel that day. The captain of the Ever Given, Captain Kanthavel, would have had the option to continue. It is always the captain's final decision.

But in this situation, a captain suffers enormous financial pressures. The shipping industry is a just-in-time business. A captain of his experience would be well aware that there were enormous amounts of money at stake for his cargo to reach Europe on time. If you look at the Suez Canal from a satellite, it looks like a pretty straight shot across the desert, with a couple of lakes along the way. And one would imagine, I imagined, that it wouldn't be particularly difficult to steer a ship through the passage. But in reality, it's a very stressful thing, all the sailors and captains we spoke to told us.

It is a very narrow gap in places, about 200 meters wide and quite shallow. Therefore, any error can cause an incident of some kind. That's why when large ships enter narrow waterways, they usually have at least one pilot on board. And a pilot is someone who knows a particular area very intimately and can advise the captain and coxswains of a ship who may not be familiar with that waterway about what to avoid, dangerous currents, submerged hazards, that sort of thing. They don't actually steer the boat, but give instructions on the best way to pass. They have to communicate with the captain and the rest of the crew on the bridge of the Ever Given, which is a difficult conversation to have because the captain and crew speak primarily English.

Most Egyptian pilots would have spoken in Arabic. Then it would have been quite difficult for them to have a proper conversation. Almost everyone we interviewed told us that the dynamic between captain and crew, and local Egyptian officials, can be tense when passing through Suez. And there are some reasons for that. The captain is the owner of his ship. Under normal circumstances he has complete control over the crew. He is the boss. But when you go through Suez, you have to hand over some of that control to the local pilots whose job it is to steer the ship through the canal.

When you talk to people in the shipping industry, you'll quickly learn that Suez pilots have a pretty mixed reputation. We received many reports of pilots asking for cigarettes, for example, and other gifts in exchange for their cooperation in crossing the channel. And all of these things add up to make the situation quite tense. So the Ever Given comes into the canal in these very windy conditions, and you have to think about the scale here. It is a 400 meter long boat. She is also located, on top of her containers, more than 50 meters above the waterline. So she really is a huge surface that the wind hits.

And what appears to have happened is that the Ever Given began to act as a kind of sail and moved back and forth in the canal. And we know from some of the evidence that has emerged in the legal proceedings that there was an argument on the bridge between the two Egyptian pilots. They were arguing about the speed, the weather. And we know that when the captain tried to get into the middle of the argument and calm things down, one of the Egyptian pilots threatened to abandon the ship, to leave his position. At one point, as the ship veered from side to side, one of the pilots, as we know from the voyage data recorder, gave the order to continue forward.

And that would have brought the Ever Given's speed to about 13 knots. And speeding up is supposed to give you more control. She gives you more control over the helm when you're trying to steer one of these huge ships. And under normal circumstances, that would be a good way to regain control. But, the situation at that time, was the worst thing they could have done because the ship is in such a narrow channel that increasing the speed, on the contrary, can make it much more difficult to control due to something called Bernoulli's Principle. And the basic idea is that as water runs faster, or any fluid runs faster, the pressure decreases.

And since there is less pressure, the container is sucked toward one shore or the other. This later became a problem as the captain, helm and bridge crew struggled to maintain control of the ship. According to what we know from the voyage data recorder, the pilots gave orders in rapid succession to go to port or starboard. Finally, one of these spins passed the point where she could recover, and the Ever Given's bow got stuck right in the sand. The boat just slows down and suddenly you realize you've crashed. So the Ever Given got stuck in one of the southern reaches of the canal, quite close to the southern entrance.

Now, Suez has been expanding over the years. The most recent in 2015. Fundamentally, these expansions have been aimed at allowing two-way traffic, for the most part. Because originally the canal was only wide enough for ships to go in one direction at a time. However, where the Ever Given was stuck was in a one-way section, there was no detour around it. Somehow, when they crashed, they managed to not only get the front end into the deserts, but the rear end of the ship was also grounded. So the ship was wedged diagonally, completely blocking the canal. At the end of the first day, there would be approximately a hundred boats anchored waiting to transit.

And that number grew steadily hour by hour. Every day, goods worth $10 billion arrived at the canal waiting to pass through. Look around you in whatever room you are in right now; the vast majority of the items in that room will have come to you on ships. And if you live in Western Europe, if you live in North America, those ships are very likely going through the Suez Canal. Therefore, all companies dealing with physical issues depend on this waterway in one way or another. So having it blocked is just a titanicly important problem. And there were billions of dollars at stake to resolve it quickly.

The 400-meter-long cargo ship Ever Given is stranded in the Suez Canal. And she is ruining global trade. Typically 50 ships a day pass through the canal, carrying 12% of world trade. So there really is pressure to revive it. The boat crashed at such speed that the front of it sank six or seven meters directly into quite rocky sand. Two tugboats arrived very quickly. They were just routine tugs, they were not especially large or powerful. But efforts were immediately made to free the ship. And she didn't move an inch. It was clear that she was firmly stuck. The main entity responsible for clearing the canal and freeing the ship is the Suez Canal Authority, which is the Egyptian government entity that controls the canal.

And the man in charge of the pilots at least is the chief pilot, Captain El-Sayed. And he was one of the first to arrive. And he, with his boss, President Rabie, came up with a plan to try to free the ship. They initially realized that simply pulling probably wouldn't be enough. They would also have to dig. The front of the ship was wedged so deeply into the shore that they would have to dig a little. One of the first photographs we have is of a small yellow excavator, right against the front of the boat, scooping up spoonful after spoonful of sand.

And you know, it looks ridiculous compared to the size of the ship, it looks desperate. This somewhat anonymous Egyptian became a global internet celebrity when photos of him went viral. Just a kind of metaphor for being trapped in a hopeless task. The ship's owners quickly hired a Dutch company called Smit, one of the largest salvage companies in the world. So a team of experts from Smit, the Netherlands and elsewhere flew in to see if there was any way to help get the ship off the ground. Rescue teams generally receive a percentage of what they save. There are different ways to pay them, but that is the traditional way.

Now, if you are a salvage team and you save a large, fully loaded oil tanker from sinking, for example, you could be in line for tens of millions of dollars. This is how Smit's team arrived on the morning of March 25. That's about two days after grounding. The opinion of these Smit salvage experts was that preparations needed to be made immediately to start removing the containers, hire a crane and devise a plan to unload these large and very heavy boxes, in order to lighten the ship. Now, as we understand it, there were some people in the Suez Canal Authority who were more reluctant to consider that option.

I think they realized that it would take months to completely unload the containers from the Ever Given. Therefore, they faced a much longer delay and a much larger blockage if they had to try to remove the containers. So the compromise that was reached was that the towing would continue until such time as a tow truck arrived. And then, if the ship was still stuck at that time, they would begin to unload it. In a situation where every day the canal is closed costs the global economy billions of dollars, no one felt they had time to wait.

On March 28, which was Sunday, two very powerful tugboats appeared from the south. Combined they had something like 200 or 300 tons of pulling power. The tide is, of course, very important. You want more water, that means more buoyancy, more ability to get the boat out of wherever it's stuck. In fact, at the end of March there was asupermoon, a time when the moon is unusually close to the Earth. The tidal peaks are higher. So if you're trying to get a 400 meter container ship off a sandbar, that's potentially very important because you have more water to work with. So everyone knew that March 28-29 was the best opportunity in weeks for the trayers to have to remove the Ever Given.

There was no sudden movement or noise. Suddenly they realized that their tugs, instead of floating on the water, were moving, and they were moving because the rear part had begun to move very slowly away from the shore. So the rear part was released first, but the front part was still wedged. One concern was that when the bow finally

broke

free, she would cross the channel. Firstly, she could cause terrible damage to anyone standing in the way, including many Suez Canal Authority vessels, and potentially also veer towards the opposite bank, running aground again. Thus, during towing operations, the crew of the Ever Given had helped install cables from the bow of their ship to the shore, four in total, so that when the bow finally cleared, they could prevent it from swinging across the channel.

Smit came up with the idea of ​​bringing ballast water to the ballast tanks at the back of the Ever Given. Her back is pushed down and her front is lifted slightly. That slight elevation of the front proved to be enough to help them out of the sand. Then, as the tide turned, the waters flowed, and the two powerful tugs pulled in the same direction, that was when the front was finally clear. And when that happened, everything happened pretty quickly. There was jubilation, as you can imagine. They all honked their horns at the same time, you could hear them from miles away.

One of the Egyptian dredges cheered and shouted number one, number one. So, once the Ever Given was free, she was towed to the Great Bitter Lake, which is a body of water in the middle of the canal. And she stayed there during what became a fairly tense legal standoff. The Suez Canal Authority, which is part of the Egyptian government, demanded compensation of more than $900 million in exchange for letting the ship go. Now, the Egyptians claimed that part of this was the so-called salvage compensation, which is the percentage of the value that you are entitled to when you salvage a ship.

Some of it was also for what amounted to reputational damage. The owners of the Ever Given, and frankly many people watching this around the world, thought that number was absurd. The Egyptian government reduced its request to 550 million. I think it's probably a safe bet that the deal was a little smaller, but we just don't know. In any case, it is a large amount of money. One of the surprising things about shipping is that it is invisible to most of us. Ships have become too big for the ports of Manhattan or East London, so the ports have been moved elsewhere.

So, in reality, shipping has disappeared from view. But in that time, she has become an even more important part of our lives than ever. Everything we depend on, all the material goods, all the energy, all the oil we put in our cars, everything we buy at a place like Ikea or Walmart, it all comes in ships. For about a week, the entire world was captivated by shipping and, in a way, also understood how fragile it is. And all it took was one wrong turn, effectively, for all that to come to a close.