The ship blocking the Suez Canal has moved slightly and could be released in the next few hours

Efforts to dislodge a giant container ship blocking the Suez Canal have allowed the stern and rudder to shift, but it’s unclear when it might float again, the canal authority chief said on Saturday.

The 400-meter-long Ever Given stuck diagonally on a southern section of the canal amid high winds early Tuesday morning, disrupting global shipping by blocking one of the world’s busiest waterways. About 15% of the world’s maritime traffic passes through the canal and hundreds of ships wait to pass once the blockade is lifted.

Suez Canal Authority (SCA) chairman Osama Rabie said he hoped it would not be necessary to remove some of the ship’s 18,300 containers to lighten its cargo, but that the strong tides and winds complicated liberation efforts. this.

“The stern of the ship started moving towards Suez, and that was a positive sign until 11:00 p.m. (9:00 p.m. GMT) overnight,” Rabie told reporters at Suez. “We hope that at any time the ship will be able to slide and move from where it is,” he added.

“I hope the ship will be released today (Sunday March 28) because it has already started to react (to the work of the tugs). I think it can be moved to the center of the channel at high tide, at midnight, so that it can be towed “, explained a source quoted by Europa Press.

As of Friday, dredgers had removed some 20,000 tons of sand around his bow. A Dutch company working to free the ship has said it could be released early next week if heavier tugs, dredging and a higher tide manage to dislodge it.

Towing attempts resumed on Saturday afternoon and further efforts were planned for Saturday evening and Sunday morning, SCA sources said, although they added that more sand may need to be removed from around the ship to release it.

Two SCA sources said there had been minor progress in the eviction of the ship on Saturday. A source said the bow of the ship had moved. “When it comes to a boat of this size its behavior with dredges is unknown, we don’t know how it will react to pulling,” Rabie said.

The container transport group CMA CGM announced on Saturday that it had decided to divert certain ships around the Cape of Good Hope due to the suspension of traffic on the Suez Canal.

The boss of Boskalis, the parent company of Dutch company Smit Salvage which was hired to help SCA, said heavy tugs with a combined capacity of 400 tonnes will arrive this weekend.

“We aim to do this after the weekend, but for that everything will have to work exactly,” Boskalis CEO Peter Berdowski told Dutch TV show Nieuwsuur on Friday evening. “The bow is really stuck in the sandy clay, but the stern hasn’t been fully sunk in the clay, which is positive. We can try to use that as a lever to release it, ”Berdowski said.

London-based analytics service Lloyd’s List has calculated that the channel’s blockade is causing ucargo holdback valued at approximately $ 9.6 billion per day, with traffic to the west valued at $ 5.1 billion and to the east at $ 4.5 billion per day. In addition, a report prepared by analysts from the French insurer Euler Hermes, a subsidiary of the German group Allianz, estimated that the closure of the chain could cost between 6 and 10 billion dollars per week to world trade.

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