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Heven though life is dark and difficult these days i would still rather be sitting on dry land locked out than trying to make a three point turn on the suez canal with a freighter 400 meters under my control. Is not it? The grounding of the container ship Ever Given in the Suez Canal caused both hilarity and genuine concern. Ships have already got stuck in the canal: at its narrowest point, the “desert ditch,” as the crew of the container ship I traveled with in 2010 told me, only measures 300 meters wide. It’s tight. This is why ships have to wait at each end to be sent in a slow convoy. But the Ever Given is longer than the channel is wide and it is stuck on the side. A simple shunt outside the banks will not work.
The blockage is costly in every way, and embarrassing for Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine, the company that operates the vessel. The Suez Canal was opened in 1869, after French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps employed forced labor to improve the rudimentary pre-existing canals (which probably existed since the time of Pharaoh Senusret III) and created an essential route for shipping traffic, expanding a lot of lives in the process and taking 10 years.
The passage through the canal saves ships over a week and many fuel costs compared to the longer route via the Cape of Good Hope. The canal is a huge source of revenue for the Egyptian government, earning it several billion dollars a year. When I passed through Maersk Kendal in 2010, as research for a book I wrote on the shipping industry, the transit cost $ 300,000. This fee included 14 hours of calm descent on what is actually a rather drab canal, once you’ve had an hour or two of excitement seeing sand and palm trees, and realize you’ve got it. another 13 hours. It also included a mandatory “Suez crew”, who joined for transit and had their own cabin, and a pilot who took control of the vessel. This is a standard procedure in modern navigation: ships often hire pilots in port areas or in difficult passages because they have better local knowledge. Technically, the pilot took command of the bridge, even though the pilot we had was too busy pushing his way through the whole menu and dozing off, to be particularly commanding. The second officer was to continue to wake him for instructions.
Although the official reason given so far for the fate of Ever Given is that it was blown sideways by the wind, I wonder. In the vast majority of marine accidents, human error is at fault. And it’s no wonder: seafarers, working in smaller and smaller crews on larger and larger ships, are stunned. Most of my trips were old enough to remember when they could stop for lunch at the port. Now ships are rarely in port for more than several hours, and they are busy. As we entered the canal, transiting south with our mostly empty boxes to collect Chinese-made consumables and essentials such as medicine, the second officer was operating three nights of three hours of sleep and not not sleeping during transit. There is, as Ever Given demonstrates, a lot to look out for during the passage.
I often think of these tired workers, when I read articles about the crew members who were stranded on their ships throughout the pandemic, forbidden to set foot on land, unable to return home. Another 10 years ago, the Filipino crew I sailed with called their work “homesick dollar”. So among the jokes and references to stranded whales, I think of the crews of the 150 ships stuck behind and in front of Ever Given.
Over the years the ships get bigger and bigger, the better to bring us 90% of the world’s trade – though most people probably think their breakfast cereals, electronics, clothes and fish are coming. by plane. In fact, modern shipping is so efficient that it is cheaper to send Scottish fish in nets to and from China than to do it at home. But this efficiency comes at a price: ships that depend on this one waterway to get to the riches of Asia, and crews that spend months away from home, missing the births and birthdays of their children, for us. bring what we need, and what we think we need.
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