It Took More Than a ‘Heat Dome’ to Turn Portland Into an Oven - Bloomberg

It Took More Than a ‘Heat Dome’ to Turn Portland Into an Oven - Bloomberg

It Took More Than a ‘Heat Dome’ to Turn Portland Into an Oven

 Meteorologist Clifford Mass has the best explanation of the heat wave—and the rapid cool-off that followed.

June 30, 2021, 10:00 AM GMT+1

Residents at a cooling center during a heatwave in Portland, Oregon, on June 28.

 

As a physics major at Cornell in the 1970s, Clifford Mass helped famed astronomer Carl Sagan develop an atmospheric model for Mars. In the decades since, armed with a doctorate in atmospheric science from the University of Washington, he has become the go-to meteorologist when the weather goes nuts in the usually mild Pacific Northwest.

 

So it’s no surprise that Mass produced the most thorough explanation for the stunning heat wave that hit the region over the past few days. The “heat dome” that everyone keeps talking about is part of the story, but only part, as Mass explained in a series of podcasts and blogs.

 

Understanding what causes extreme weather like the heat wave is essential, as Mass says, because early and accurate forecasts can allow for preparations that save lives. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says 291 weather and climate disasters in the U.S. have caused $1 billion or more in damages or costs, for a total of $1.9 trillion in 2021 dollars.)

 

The big story on June 29 was how quickly the extreme heat leaked away. As this chart of National Weather Service data shows, the temperature at Portland International Airport fell from 115 degrees on June 28 at 3:53 p.m. to 63 degrees on June 29 at 5:53 a.m. That’s a drop of 52 degrees in 14 hours—almost a Martian rate of cooling.

 

 

Still, the record temperatures won’t soon be forgotten. As Mass put it in a June 25 podcast looking ahead to the heat wave, “The pieces that need to come together to make this amazing event are pieces that can happen by themselves but rarely have occurred simultaneously.” Or, as he said in an accompanying blog post,  “it is like throwing several dice and having all of them come up with sixes.”

 

The ridge of high pressure in the upper atmosphere—the heat dome, as it’s called—was a necessary but insufficient condition. After all, if a high-pressure ridge was all it took, bouts of extreme heat would be common occurrences.

 

Another essential factor was that the ridge of high pressure was matched by a trough of low pressure just offshore. Both were probably the result of “a tropical disturbance that went northward” and “banged into the jet stream,” Mass said on his podcast.

 

The big pressure differential between the ridge and the nearby trough produced strong winds, which brought warm air from the desert southwest, Mass said. Topping it all off, as the flow of air came down the western slope of the Cascades mountain range, it became warmed by compression. Though Mass didn’t mention it in his podcast, that’s the same phenomenon—adiabatic heating—that raises the temperature of the scorching Santa Ana winds in southern California.

 

In a follow-up blog post on June 29, Mass marveled that “Seattle now has a higher record maximum temperature than Miami, Atlanta, Washington, D.C.,  or Chicago,” while “Portland's record high exceeded that of Houston, Austin, or San Diego.”  He explained the abrupt cooling by saying that “a thin layer of marine air surged in last night.” Relief at last.

China's crypto miner exodus - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

China's crypto miner exodus - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

 The global Bitcoin network’s total computing power has plunged roughly 60% since the start of last month, according to data tracker Mining Pool Stats.

Now, many of those China-based miners are looking overseas, from the U.S. to Russia and Kazakhstan. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez told CNBC that his city welcomes the Chinese miners and touted its nuclear energy. “We’re talking to a lot of companies and just telling them, ‘Hey, we want you to be here,’” the crypto-friendly politician said.

What’s driving China’s anti-crypto moves? For one, officials have grown wary of Bitcoin mining’s huge power consumption—more annually than all of the Netherlands—at a time when President Xi Jinping has set ambitious climate goals. Another less heralded reason is the challenge that crypto’s rise poses to Beijing’s cherished financial stability. Miners have to exchange their product for yuan to pay electricity bills, cover rent and buy new machines. That newly minted Bitcoin then leads to other transactions within Chinese borders that are difficult for regulators to track.

America’s water wars are just beginning - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

America’s water wars are just beginning - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Editing Bodies: What Could Go Wrong?

The biggest problem with space travel is not xenomorphs or the fact that humans can’t build ships with warp drives, but that space is just a nightmare for human bodies. There’s no air. There’s no gravity. And it’s constantly showered in deadly radiation. Some science fiction solves these problems by pretending they don’t exist (see Wars, Star). Other sci-fi assumes humans will reshape their bodies to handle it better. Like “The Water Knife,” give or take a few decades, that day isn’t so far off.   

That’s the premise of a new book by Dr. Christopher E. Mason of Weill Cornell Medicine. In an interview with Adam Minter, Mason says humans could edit their own genes to handle radiation and other space horrors (though maybe not xenomorphs) to help them colonize Mars and beyond.

It won’t happen tomorrow. For one thing, the technology is still too new. But it’s getting there: Intellia Therapeutics and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals this weekend released promising human-trial data for Crispr gene-editing tech. Sam Fazeli writes the results suggest we can safely target specific genes for zapping, which would be a huge breakthrough for fighting diseases. It’s also maybe a huge Slip ’N Slide to ethical dead zones — real “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could” kind of stuff. But maybe also another step on the way to the stars. 

Did Covid Come from a Lab? Scientist At Wuhan Institute Speaks Out - Bloomberg

Did Covid Come from a Lab? Scientist At Wuhan Institute Speaks Out - Bloomberg

The Last–And Only–Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out

Virologist Danielle Anderson paints a very different picture of the Wuhan Institute.

 

By

June 27, 2021, 10:00 PM GMT+1

 

Danielle Anderson was working in what has become the world’s most notorious laboratory just weeks before the first known cases of Covid-19 emerged in central China. Yet, the Australian virologist still wonders what she missed.

 

An expert in bat-borne viruses, Anderson is the only foreign scientist to have undertaken research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s BSL-4 lab, the first in mainland China equipped to handle the planet’s deadliest pathogens. Her most recent stint ended in November 2019, giving Anderson an insider’s perspective on a place that’s become a flashpoint in the search for what caused the worst pandemic in a century.

 

The emergence of the coronavirus in the same city where institute scientists, clad head-to-toe in protective gear, study that exact family of viruses has stoked speculation that it might have leaked from the lab, possibly via an infected staffer or a contaminated object. China’s lack of transparency since the earliest days of the outbreak fueled those suspicions, which have been seized on by the U.S. That’s turned the quest to uncover the origins of the virus, critical for preventing future pandemics, into a geopolitical minefield.

 

The work of the lab and the director of its emerging infectious diseases section—Shi Zhengli, a long-time colleague of Anderson’s dubbed ‘Batwoman’ for her work hunting viruses in caves—is now shrouded in controversy. The U.S. has questioned the lab’s safety and alleged its scientists were engaged in contentious gain of function research that manipulated viruses in a manner that could have made them more dangerous.

 

It’s a stark contrast to the place Anderson described in an interview with Bloomberg News, the first in which she’s shared details about working at the lab.

 

Half-truths and distorted information have obscured an accurate accounting of the lab's functions and activities, which were more routine than how they’ve been portrayed in the media, she said.

 

“It’s not that it was boring, but it was a regular lab that worked in the same way as any other high-containment lab,” Anderson said. “What people are saying is just not how it is.”

 

Now at Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Anderson began collaborating with Wuhan researchers in 2016, when she was scientific director of the biosafety lab at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School. Her research—which focuses on why lethal viruses like Ebola and Nipah cause no disease in the bats in which they perpetually circulate—complemented studies underway at the Chinese institute, which offered funding to encourage international collaboration.

 

A rising star in the virology community, Anderson, 42, says her work on Ebola in Wuhan was the realization of a life-long career goal. Her favorite movie is “Outbreak,” the 1995 film in which disease experts respond to a dangerous new virus—a job Anderson said she wanted to do. For her, that meant working on Ebola in a high-containment laboratory.

 

Anderson’s career has taken her all over the world. After obtaining an undergraduate degree from Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, she worked as a lab technician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, then returned to Australia to complete a PhD under the supervision of eminent virologists John Mackenzie and Linfa Wang. She did post-doctoral work in Montreal, before moving to Singapore and working again with Wang, who described Anderson as “very committed and dedicated,” and similar in personality to Shi.

 

“They’re both very blunt with such high moral standards,” Wang said by phone from Singapore, where he’s the director of the emerging infectious diseases program at the Duke-NUS Medical School. “I’m very proud of what Danielle’s been able to do.”

 

On the Ground

Anderson was on the ground in Wuhan when experts believe the virus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, was beginning to spread. Daily visits for a period in late 2019 put her in close proximity to many others working at the 65-year-old research center. She was part of a group that gathered each morning at the Chinese Academy of Sciences to catch a bus that shuttled them to the institute about 20 miles away.

 

As the sole foreigner, Anderson stood out, and she said the other researchers there looked out for her.

 

“We went to dinners together, lunches, we saw each other outside of the lab,” she said.

 

From her first visit before it formally opened in 2018, Anderson was impressed with the institute’s maximum biocontainment lab. The concrete, bunker-style building has the highest biosafety designation, and requires air, water and waste to be filtered and sterilized before it leaves the facility. There were strict protocols and requirements aimed at containing the pathogens being studied, Anderson said, and researchers underwent 45 hours of training to be certified to work independently in the lab.

 

The induction process required scientists to demonstrate their knowledge of containment procedures and their competency in wearing air-pressured suits. “It’s very, very extensive,” Anderson said.

 

Entering and exiting the facility was a carefully choreographed endeavor, she said. Departures were made especially intricate by a requirement to take both a chemical shower and a personal shower—the timings of which were precisely planned.

 

Special Disinfectants

These rules are mandatory across BSL-4 labs, though Anderson noted differences compared with similar facilities in Europe, Singapore and Australia in which she’s worked. The Wuhan lab uses a bespoke method to make and monitor its disinfectants daily, a system Anderson was inspired to introduce in her own lab. She was connected via a headset to colleagues in the lab’s command center to enable constant communication and safety vigilance—steps designed to ensure nothing went awry.

 

However, the Trump administration’s focus in 2020 on the idea the virus escaped from the Wuhan facility suggested that something went seriously wrong at the institute, the only one to specialize in virology, viral pathology and virus technology of the some 20 biological and biomedical research institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

Virologists and infectious disease experts initially dismissed the theory, noting that viruses jump from animals to humans with regularity. There was no clear evidence from within SARS-CoV-2’s genome that it had been artificially manipulated, or that the lab harbored progenitor strains of the pandemic virus. Political observers suggested the allegations had a strategic basis and were designed to put pressure on Beijing.

 

And yet, China’s actions raised questions. The government refused to allow international scientists into Wuhan in early 2020 when the outbreak was mushrooming, including experts from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who were already in the region.

 

Beijing stonewalled on allowing World Health Organization experts into Wuhan for more than a year, and then provided only limited access. The WHO team’s final report, written with and vetted by Chinese researchers, played down the possibility of a lab leak. Instead, it said the virus probably spread via a bat through another animal, and gave some credence to a favored Chinese theory that it could have been transferred via frozen food.

 

Never Sick

China’s obfuscation led outside researchers to reconsider their stance. Last month, 18 scientists writing in the journal Science called for an investigation into Covid-19’s origins that would give balanced consideration to the possibility of a lab accident. Even the director-general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the lab theory hadn’t been studied extensively enough.

 

But it’s U.S. President Joe Biden’s consideration of the idea—previously dismissed by many as a Trumpist conspiracy theory—that has given it newfound legitimacy. Biden called on America’s intelligence agencies last month to redouble their efforts in rooting out the genesis of Covid-19 after an earlier report, disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, claimed three researchers from the lab were hospitalized with flu-like symptoms in November 2019.

 

What the World Wants China to Disclose in Wuhan Lab Leak Probe

 

Anderson said no one she knew at the Wuhan institute was ill toward the end of 2019. Moreover, there is a procedure for reporting symptoms that correspond with the pathogens handled in high-risk containment labs.

 

“If people were sick, I assume that I would have been sick—and I wasn’t,” she said. “I was tested for coronavirus in Singapore before I was vaccinated, and had never had it.”

 

Not only that, many of Anderson’s collaborators in Wuhan came to Singapore at the end of December for a gathering on Nipah virus. There was no word of any illness sweeping the laboratory, she said.

 

“There was no chatter,” Anderson said. “Scientists are gossipy and excited. There was nothing strange from my point of view going on at that point that would make you think something is going on here.”

 

The names of the scientists reported to have been hospitalized haven’t been disclosed. The Chinese government and Shi Zhengli, the lab’s now-famous bat-virus researcher, have repeatedly denied that anyone from the facility contracted Covid-19. Anderson’s work at the facility, and her funding, ended after the pandemic emerged and she focused on the novel coronavirus.

 

‘I’m Not Naive’

It’s not that it’s impossible the virus spilled from there. Anderson, better than most people, understands how a pathogen can escape from a laboratory. SARS, an earlier coronavirus that emerged in Asia in 2002 and killed more than 700 people, subsequently made its way out of secure facilities a handful of times, she said.

 

If presented with evidence that such an accident spawned Covid-19, Anderson “could foresee how things could maybe happen,” she said. “I’m not naive enough to say I absolutely write this off.”

 

And yet, she still believes it most likely came from a natural source. Since it took researchers almost a decade to pin down where in nature the SARS pathogen emerged, Anderson says she’s not surprised they haven’t found the “smoking gun” bat responsible for the latest outbreak yet.

 

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is large enough that Anderson said she didn’t know what everyone was working on at the end of 2019. She is aware of published research from the lab that involved testing viral components for their propensity to infect human cells. Anderson is convinced no virus was made intentionally to infect people and deliberately released—one of the more disturbing theories to have emerged about the pandemic’s origins.

 

Gain of Function

Anderson did concede that it would be theoretically possible for a scientist in the lab to be working on a gain of function technique to unknowingly infect themselves and to then unintentionally infect others in the community. But there’s no evidence that occurred and Anderson rated its likelihood as exceedingly slim.

 

Getting authorization to create a virus in this way typically requires many layers of approval, and there are scientific best practices that put strict limits on this kind of work. For example, a moratorium was placed on research that could be done on the 1918 Spanish Flu virus after scientists isolated it decades later.

 

Even if such a gain of function effort got clearance, it’s hard to achieve, Anderson said. The technique is called reverse genetics.

 

“It’s exceedingly difficult to actually make it work when you want it to work,” she said.

 

Anderson’s lab in Singapore was one of the first to isolate SARS-CoV-2 from a Covid patient outside China and then to grow the virus. It was complicated and challenging, even for a team used to working with coronaviruses that knew its biological characteristics, including which protein receptor it targets. These key facets wouldn’t be known by anyone trying to craft a new virus, she said. Even then, the material that researchers study—the virus’s basic building blocks and genetic fingerprint—aren’t initially infectious, so they would need to culture significant amounts to infect people.

 

Despite this, Anderson does think an investigation is needed to nail down the virus’s origin once and for all. She’s dumbfounded by the portrayal of the lab by some media outside China, and the toxic attacks on scientists that have ensued.

 

One of a dozen experts appointed to an international taskforce in November to study the origins of the virus, Anderson hasn’t sought public attention, especially since being targeted by U.S. extremists in early 2020 after she exposed false information about the pandemic posted online. The vitriol that ensued prompted her to file a police report. The threats of violence many coronavirus scientists have experienced over the past 18 months have made them hesitant to speak out because of the risk that their words will be misconstrued.

 

The elements known to trigger infectious outbreaks—the mixing of humans and animals, especially wildlife—were present in Wuhan, creating an environment conducive for the spillover of a new zoonotic disease. In that respect, the emergence of Covid-19 follows a familiar pattern. What’s shocking to Anderson is the way it unfurled into a global contagion.

 

“The pandemic is something no one could have imagined on this scale,” she said. Researchers must study Covid's calamitous path to determine what went wrong and how to stop the spread of future pathogens with pandemic potential.

 

“The virus was in the right place at the right time and everything lined up to cause this disaster.”

 

 

 

The Earth Has a Pulse: 27.5-Million-Year Cycle of Geological Activity Discovered

The Earth Has a Pulse: 27.5-Million-Year Cycle of Geological Activity Discovered

TOPICS:Climate ChangeGeologyGeophysicsNew York UniversityOceanographyPopular

By NEW YORK UNIVERSITY JUNE 20, 2021

Analysis of 260 million years of major geological events finds recurring clusters 27.5 million years apart.

Geologic activity on Earth appears to follow a 27.5-million-year cycle, giving the planet a “pulse,” according to a new study published in the journal Geoscience Frontiers.

“Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time. But our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle, suggesting that these geologic events are correlated and not random,” said Michael Rampino, a geologist and professor in New York University’s Department of Biology, as well as the study’s lead author.

Over the past five decades, researchers have proposed cycles of major geological events — including volcanic activity and mass extinctions on land and sea — ranging from roughly 26 to 36 million years. But early work on these correlations in the geological record was hampered by limitations in the age-dating of geologic events, which prevented scientists from conducting quantitative investigations.

However, there have been significant improvements in radio-isotopic dating techniques and changes in the geologic timescale, leading to new data on the timing of past events. Using the latest age-dating data available, Rampino and his colleagues compiled updated records of major geological events over the last 260 million years and conducted new analyses.

NYU researchers found that global geologic events are generally clustered at 10 different timepoints over the 260 million years, grouped in peaks or pulses of roughly 27.5 million years apart. Credit: Rampino et al., Geoscience Frontiers

The team analyzed the ages of 89 well-dated major geological events of the last 260 million years. These events include marine and land extinctions, major volcanic outpourings of lava called flood-basalt eruptions, events when oceans were depleted of oxygen, sea-level fluctuations, and changes or reorganization in the Earth’s tectonic plates.

They found that these global geologic events are generally clustered at 10 different timepoints over the 260 million years, grouped in peaks or pulses of roughly 27.5 million years apart. The most recent cluster of geological events was approximately 7 million years ago, suggesting that the next pulse of major geological activity is more than 20 million years in the future.

The researchers posit that these pulses may be a function of cycles of activity in the Earth’s interior — geophysical processes related to the dynamics of plate tectonics and climate. However, similar cycles in the Earth’s orbit in space might also be pacing these events.

“Whatever the origins of these cyclical episodes, our findings support the case for a largely periodic, coordinated, and intermittently catastrophic geologic record, which is a departure from the views held by many geologists,” explained Rampino.

Reference: “A pulse of the Earth: A 27.5-Myr underlying cycle in coordinated geological events over the last 260 Myr” by Michael R. Rampino, Ken Caldeira and Yuhong Zhu, 17 June 2021, Geoscience Frontiers.
DOI: 10.1016/j.gsf.2021.101245

How the Billion-Dollar Ever Given Cargo Ship Got Stuck in the Suez Canal - Bloomberg

How the Billion-Dollar Ever Given Cargo Ship Got Stuck in the Suez Canal - Bloomberg

Six Days in Suez: The Inside Story of the Ship That Broke Global Trade

How the Ever Given and its billion-dollar cargo got stuck, got free, got impounded, and got taken to court.

 

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 Rescue vessels in the Suez Canal work to dislodge the Ever Given on March 26. PHOTOGRAPHER: AHMED GOMAA/XINHUA/ZUMA PRESS

By , , and  June 24, 2021, 12:01 AM EDT

 

Captain Krishnan Kanthavel watched the sun rise over the Red Sea through a dusty haze. Winds of more than 40 mph, whipping off the Egyptian desert, had turned the sky an anemic yellow. From his viewpoint on the bridge, it was just possible to see the dark outlines of the 19 other vessels anchored in Suez Bay, waiting for their turn to enter the narrow channel snaking inland toward the Mediterranean.

 

 

Kanthavel’s container vessel was scheduled to be the 13th ship traveling north through the Suez Canal on March 23, 2021. His was one of the largest in the queue. It was also one of the newest and most valuable, only a few years out of the shipyard. Ever Given, the name painted in block letters on its stern, stood out in crisp white against the forest-green hull. Soon after daybreak, a small craft approached, carrying the local pilots who’d guide the ship during its 12-hour journey between the seas.

 

Transiting the Suez Canal is sometimes nerve-racking. The channel saves a three-week detour around Africa, but it’s narrow, about 200 meters (656 feet) wide in parts, and just 24 meters deep. Modern ships, by contrast, are massive and getting bigger. The Ever Given is 400 meters from bow to stern and nearly 60 meters across—most of the width of a Manhattan city block, and almost as long as the Empire State Building is high. En route from Malaysia to the Netherlands, it was loaded with about 17,600 brightly colored containers. Its keel would be only a few meters from the canal bottom. That didn’t leave much room for error.

 

After climbing aboard, the two Egyptian pilots were led up to the bridge to meet the captain, officers, and helmsmen, all of them Indian, like the rest of the crew. According to documents filed weeks later in an Egyptian court, there was a dispute at some point about whether the ship should enter the canal at all, given the bad weather—a debate that may have been hampered by the fact that English was neither side’s first language. At least four nearby ports had already closed because of the storm, and a day earlier the captain of a natural gas carrier sailing from Qatar had decided it was too gusty to traverse Suez safely.

 

Like airplanes, modern ships carry voyage data recorders, or VDRs, black-box devices that capture conversations on the bridge. The full recording of what transpired on the Ever Given’s bridge hasn’t been released by the Egyptian government, so it isn’t clear exactly what the pilots and crew said about the conditions. But the commercial pressures on Captain Kanthavel, an experienced mariner from Tamil Nadu, in India’s far south, would have been enormous. His ship was carrying roughly $1 billion worth of cargo, including Ikea furniture, Nike sneakers, Lenovo laptops, and 100 containers of an unidentified flammable liquid.

 

Several other corporate entities also had an interest in getting the Ever Given’s containers speedily to Europe. Among them was its owner, Shoei Kisen Kaisha Ltd., a shipping concern controlled by a wealthy Japanese family, and Evergreen Group, a Taiwanese conglomerate that operated it under a long-term charter. The crew, meanwhile, worked for Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, a German company that supplies sailors for commercial vessels and oversees their operations. Every day’s delay would add tens of thousands of dollars in costs, if not more.

 

Veteran captains say they often don’t have much choice about sailing into Suez in poor conditions. “Do it, or we’ll find someone else who will,” they’re sometimes told. But modern ships have radar and electronic sensors that technically allow the canal to be navigated even in zero visibility. And Kanthavel, whom a former colleague describes as a calm, confident officer, had ample experience navigating Suez.

 

From the bridge, Kanthavel could see about a half-mile ahead. Other vessels in the northbound convoy were on the move, gliding past the tall cranes at the canal’s mouth. The captain could still have refused to proceed, but with an all-clear from the agency that manages the waterway, and with everyone eager to get going, he carried on. The lead Egyptian pilot leaned into his radio and had a brief conversation in Arabic between bursts of static. Then he instructed the bridge crew to power forward. As the scattered settlements around the port gave way to bare desert, the Ever Given cruised past a large sign that read, “Welcome to Egypt.”

 

Suez pilots are employed by the Suez Canal Authority, which has operated the route since the Egyptian government took control of it in 1956. Often former naval officers, the pilots don’t physically steer transiting ships themselves. Their job is to give instructions to captains and helmsmen, communicate with the rest of the convoy and the SCA control tower, and ensure that the vessels get through safely, which they mostly do.

 

For some visitors, though, encounters with the SCA can be a source of stress. Although the captain remains technically in charge, he or she surrenders a good deal of control to strangers in uniform, whose professionalism and competence vary. In addition to pilots, SCA electricians, mooring specialists, and health inspectors may also come on board. Each one requires paperwork, food, space, and supervision. They may also demand cartons of cigarettes, a problem that prompted a maritime anti-corruption group in 2015 to create a “Say No” campaign, urging shipping lines to refuse to hand any over. (The SCA has in the past denied such allegations.)

 

Chris Gillard sailed the canal about once a month from 2008 through 2019 as an officer with his former employer, Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S. Between the pilots and the navigation challenges, he came to dread the crossing. “I’d rather have a colonoscopy than go through the Suez,” he said in an interview. The situation has improved in recent years, but the dynamic can still be fraught.

 

A few miles into the Ever Given’s transit, the ship began to veer alarmingly from port to starboard and back again. Its blocky shape may have been acting as a gigantic sail, buffeted by the wind. In response, according to evidence submitted in legal proceedings, the lead SCA pilot began barking instructions at the Indian helmsman. The pilot shouted to steer hard right, then hard left. The Ever Given’s vast hull took so long to respond that by the time it began to move, he needed to correct course again. When the second pilot objected, the two argued. They may have exchanged insults in Arabic. (The SCA hasn’t released the pilots’ names and denies they were at fault for what followed.)

 

The lead pilot then gave a new order: “Full ahead.” That would take the Ever Given’s speed to 13 knots, or 15 mph, significantly faster than the canal’s recommended speed limit of about 8 knots. The second pilot tried to cancel the order, and more angry words were exchanged. Kanthavel intervened, and the lead pilot responded by threatening to leave the vessel, according to the court evidence.

 

The increase in power should have provided the Ever Given with more stability in the face of the gale, but it also brought a new factor into play. Bernoulli’s principle, named for an 18th century Swiss mathematician, states that a fluid’s pressure goes down when its speed goes up. The hundreds of thousands of tons of canal water the ship was displacing had to squeeze through the narrow gap between its hull and the nearest shore. As the water rushed through, the pressure would have decreased, sucking the Ever Given closer to the bank. The faster it went, the greater the pull. “Speeding up to a certain point is effective, then it becomes countereffective,” Gillard said. “You won’t be steering a straight line no matter what you do.”

 

Suddenly, it became clear the Ever Given was going to crash. Although no footage of the incident has been made public, the final few seconds would have unfolded with the horrible slowness of a collapsing building—a gigantic object surrendering to invisible forces. According to a person familiar with the VDR audio, Captain Kanthavel reacted as anyone might in the same situation. “Shit!” he screamed.

 

 

Consider every item within 10 feet of you right now. Shoes, furniture, toys, pens, phones, computers—if you live in Europe or North America, there’s a very good chance they sailed through the Suez Canal. The canal is the essential link between East and West, a dichotomy that lodged in the popular imagination centuries ago in part because of the difficulty in crossing from one to the other. Before it existed, mariners had to brave pirates and violent storms by sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, while merchants traveling on land risked robbery or worse as they crossed the desert.

 

The idea of a direct route across the Suez isthmus was dismissed as a fantasy until the 19th century, when it was taken up by a cross-dressing French wine merchant named Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin. A utopian socialist and early advocate of gender equality, Enfantin believed the East had a female essence, while the West was intrinsically male. Egypt, and specifically Suez, could be their “nuptial bed,” the site of a reconciliation between the world’s great cultures.

 

Enfantin’s ideas reached Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French diplomat serving in Cairo, who rallied to the cause. Eventually, Lesseps founded an entity called the Suez Canal Company and persuaded Egyptian ruler Sa’id Pasha and Emperor Napoleon III of France to support the project. The government of Egypt bought 44% of the shares, with French retail investors acquiring the bulk of the rest. Tens of thousands of Egyptian peasants began digging out the channel by hand, later assisted by machines imported from Europe.

 

In 1869, the 120-mile miracle in the desert was complete. It soon became a vital commercial artery, particularly for European powers expanding their colonial empires in Asia. Egyptians saw few of the benefits. The canal’s construction proved financially ruinous for the country, and it was forced to sell its shares to the British government to satisfy creditors. Then, in 1882, Britain used a nationalist uprising as a pretext to send more than 30,000 troops into Egypt, turning it into a client state and seizing the canal. Suez had become an asset the European powers couldn’t afford to lose.

 

Anger at this act of imperial aggression festered, and in 1956 the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the waterway. An Anglo-French attempt to take it back with support from Israel was a humiliating failure, collapsing after President Dwight Eisenhower made it clear that the U.S. wouldn’t tolerate the recolonization of a chunk of the Middle East. From then on, the canal would remain in Egyptian hands. In 2015, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi opened an $8.5 billion expansion, increasing capacity and cutting transit times. Billboards in Cairo declared that it was “Egypt’s gift to the world.”

 

Today 19,000 vessels a year pass through the canal, loaded with more than a billion tons of goods. With tolls that can run as high as $1 million for the largest ships, the SCA brings Egypt about $5 billion annually. The country’s government is understandably proud of its central role in maritime trade. It’s also touchy about any suggestion that it’s not an ideal custodian for one of the world economy’s most critical assets.

 

 

“I’d rather have a colonoscopy than go through the Suez”

 

Early on March 23, Captain Mohamed Elsayed Hassanin was just starting his shift in the control tower atop the SCA’s headquarters in Ismailia, about 50 miles north of the Ever Given’s position. As pilots radioed in to say that ship No. 13 in the northbound convoy had run aground, the results, captured by the CCTV cameras that line the waterway, were being displayed on a flickering monitor in front of Elsayed’s command post. No one in the control tower had ever seen anything like it: The vessel was wedged diagonally across the channel. When the camera zoomed in, Elsayed could see the forlorn figure of Kanthavel standing on the Ever Given’s bridge.

 

A former navy captain, Elsayed is a stern man who takes his job as chief pilot seriously. He’d been promoted to the position two years earlier, after almost 40 years of maritime experience and a decade at the SCA. He has smooth features, with deep lines around his eyes, and wears a pressed white uniform with black and gold epaulettes, spotless down to his white shoes.

 

Elsayed oversees four convoys daily, two from the south and two from the north. Part of his job is nautical choreography. More than half of the canal is too narrow for large ships to safely pass each other. That’s why vessels travel in convoys, waiting in one of the lakes or side channels for the group going the other way to pass.

 

It was clear, Elsayed said in an interview, that the Ever Given was stuck in one of the worst possible spots: a one-way section of the canal. He decided to take a look for himself. After a short car trip, he boarded a small boat and pulled up to the cargo ship. Even for someone accustomed to huge merchant vessels, the Ever Given’s scale was striking. It reminded Elsayed of a metal mountain, rising from the opalescent channel.

 

Below the waterline, the bulbous bow had been driven like a dagger deep into the rocks and coarse sand. Somehow, the back end had also run aground, lodging in the opposite bank and leaving the ship at a 45-degree angle to the shore. Nothing could pass. The force of the impact had also pushed the bow upward by six meters. Container ships aren’t designed to sit on an angle, and with the Ever Given’s weight distribution thrown off and only a few meters of water supporting the vessel’s middle section, Elsayed thought there was a real possibility it would break in half.

 

A couple of SCA tugboats were already at the scene, and divers were in the water checking for hull damage. Elsayed scaled a ladder to meet Kanthavel on the bridge. The captain was visibly shaken, and Elsayed tried to keep him calm. “Everything will be solved, inshallah,” he said.

 

He asked Kanthavel about the Ever Given’s hull, the weight of its cargo, and the amount of water in its ballast tanks. If they could lighten its load, the extra buoyancy might help lift it off the bank. Elsayed did some quick mental arithmetic. The ratio of tonnage to flotation was 201 tons for each centimeter. Getting the vessel one meter out of the water would require removing more than 20,000 tons of cargo—an enormous undertaking even if the SCA could find a crane tall enough to reach containers piled more than 50 meters above the surface.

 

The two tugs attached cables to the Ever Given and began trying to drag it free, their engines churning the water into spirals. The ship didn’t budge. Elsayed and his boss, SCA Chairman Osama Rabie, improvised a plan: They would run 12-hour shifts, alternating between excavators on shore removing the rocky soil around the bow and stern, and tugboats pulling with as much horsepower as possible. The diggers would gouge downward during low tide. The tugs would exploit the additional buoyancy provided by high tide to tow. To help the excavators, Elsayed summoned two SCA dredgers, floating barges with spinning metal teeth that could be lowered into the water to chew up the canal bed. They were due to arrive later that day.

 

First on the scene was a single yellow digger, sent by a contractor working nearby. The driver approached nervously and started scraping scoopfuls of rocky earth from around the bow. He was terrified, according to an interview he later gave with Insider, that the metal behemoth looming over him would topple or shift, crushing him. The comical size mismatch was captured by the SCA’s communications team, which had a photographer on hand to show the world the authority was doing all it could to get the canal open again. The image of the lonely excavator went viral, and for the first time in its history, Suez was both a vital commercial passage and a meme.

 

After giving their account of the accident to Elsayed, the two SCA pilots who’d been on the Ever Given’s bridge prepared to disembark. As they did so they continued to bicker, according to lawsuit evidence that’s disputed by the SCA. “These vessels are not supposed to enter,” the lead pilot said.

 

“Why did you let it enter?” his colleague responded.

 

 

Keith Svendsen was driving to work when his mobile phone rang. One of his colleagues from APM Terminals, a Netherlands-based operator of container ports, was on the line with news. Details were scant, but there was some kind of trouble in Suez. Staff at Maersk, APMT’s parent company, were rushing to find out more.

 

If shipping conglomerates like Evergreen Group keep ocean trade moving, APMT provides a link between land and sea, loading and unloading about 32,000 ships a year in Los Angeles, Mumbai, Gothenburg, and some 70 other locations, day and night, in an unceasing ballet of cranes and metal boxes. It also co-owns Tanjung Pelepas, the Malaysian port that was the Ever Given’s last stop before Suez.

 

As Svendsen, a plain-spoken Dane who serves as APMT’s chief operating officer, arrived at his office in The Hague, he wasn’t overly concerned. Mishaps in Suez weren’t uncommon and could usually be resolved within hours. In three decades as a seafarer and shipping executive, he’d dealt with more than a few close calls, some in that very waterway. They usually worked themselves out.

 

It was soon apparent to Svendsen, though, that the Ever Given’s accident was well out of the ordinary and would have serious repercussions. Like car manufacturing and supermarket distribution, modern cargo shipping is a just-in-time business, built around the expectation that goods will arrive precisely when needed. Before containers were widely adopted in the 1970s, it could take a week or more to empty a large ship and then refill it. Today, vessels carrying 10,000 containers or more might spend just hours in a given port, unloaded by automated cranes guided by sophisticated planning algorithms. It’s an efficient model, saving on storage and inventory, but a fragile one. It takes only a single problem in the supply chain for everything to seize up.

 

A prolonged closure of Suez risked a cascade of delays that would be felt in day-to-day commerce by millions of people, if not billions, for months. A vessel missing its scheduled arrival at APMT’s terminal in New Jersey wouldn’t just create a problem for the American companies waiting for its cargo. It would also mean a pileup of all the containers the ship was supposed to pick up for export. And, half a world away, factories in China or Malaysia counting on the same vessel to pick up their goods weeks later would need to find alternative options—which, given the disruption, might not exist.

 

APMT convened a crisis management team and started planning for various scenarios. What would happen to its ports if the canal was closed for 24 hours? Three days? Two weeks? Each increment of delay meant more vessels and cargo waiting to get through, unless they took a detour of thousands of nautical miles.

 

“Our job was to find out when we’d have a breaking point situation,” Svendsen said in an interview. Two weeks would be a disaster for world trade, the team concluded. Anything less than a week would be manageable, if challenging. Svendsen could only hope that someone would pull the Ever Given clear before then.

 

 

As the ship drew away from the bank, one of the ropes binding the bow to the shore snapped. Then another. Then another

 

Soon after the grounding, an engineer on a Maersk ship directly behind the Ever Given in the northbound convoy took a striking photograph of the vessel, side-on in the channel against the apocalyptic backdrop of a sandstorm. “Looks like we might be here for a little bit,” she wrote, posting the image on Instagram.

 

It took about 24 hours for the SCA to release its first public statement, in which it said the Ever Given had lost control in bad weather. Evergreen, which declined to make any of its executives available for an interview, blamed a “suspected sudden strong wind,” while one local maritime agent cited a “blackout.” By the end of the day on March 24, 185 vessels were anchored nearby waiting to pass, carrying electronics, cement, water, millions of barrels of oil, and several thousand head of livestock. A shipping journal estimated that $10 billion worth of marine traffic per day was piling up.

 

Help was on its way from Europe: A team from SMIT Salvage, part of the Dutch marine conglomerate Royal Boskalis Westminster NV, had been hired by the Ever Given’s owners in Japan. Salvors are like a 24/7 rescue service for the high seas. When a cruise liner starts to sink or an oil tanker is set alight, salvage crews rush to the scene to recover people, cargo, and equipment. It’s one of the world’s most adrenaline-soaked professions, and salvors employ all manner of Thunderbirds-style vehicles to get the job done, including helicopters and high-powered tugs with names like Sea Stallion and Nordic Giant. The business can be extremely lucrative. Under standard terms, crews receive a percentage of the value of whatever they rescue, potentially earning tens of millions of dollars. Fail, and they may get nothing.

 

After the SMIT team arrived on March 25, its members surveyed the Ever Given and then met Elsayed and his SCA colleagues on board. SMIT was there to advise, not take over, because Suez salvage operations fall under the SCA’s jurisdiction. But the Dutch experts had a plan. If towing didn’t work, they told Elsayed over the course of several meetings, it would be critical to lighten the ship. They’d already located a crane that was tall enough to reach the Ever Given’s deck and capable of removing five containers an hour, load by painstaking load, until the vessel was 10,000 tons lighter. The crane could be there the following week. They just needed to charter a vessel to sail it in.

 

relates to Six Days in Suez: The Inside Story of the Ship That Broke Global Trade

The Ever Given, as seen from space on March 25.PHOTO: CNES 2021, DISTRIBUTION AIRBUS DS

“Where are you going to put the containers?” Elsayed asked. A SMIT executive said they’d be offloaded to a smaller boat, which would go to a lake a few miles up the canal, to be transferred by yet another crane to yet another boat. Elsayed thought that would take at least three months. “We don’t have time,” he said. SMIT argued it was prudent to have a backup option. Eventually everyone agreed that they should keep dredging and towing until the giant crane arrived. If there was no movement by then, they would start taking boxes off.

 

SMIT put out a call to its partners and contractors, seeking the most powerful tugs they could find. The available ones included a sizable Italian-owned boat, the Carlo Magno, that was already en route to Egypt from the Red Sea, a few days away. The Alp Guard, a Dutch behemoth with 280 tons of pulling power, was also days out.

 

Elsayed was now living on the Ever Given. He and Rabie, who was staying on a dredger, spent much of their time on the radio, trying to keep their crews’ spirits up. None of the SCA’s sailors, engineers, and drivers were getting much sleep in the army tents that had been erected alongside the canal. After an exhausting day spent attaching cables, squeezing extra turns of power out of engines, or operating excavators, they might discover that the Ever Given had shifted only a meter. “This is a good sign,” Elsayed would tell them. “It moved. Tomorrow it will be more.”

 

Privately, he was terrified someone would get hurt. Elsayed also had a son working on one of the tugs. During the tug shifts, as many as five of the SCA’s smaller craft would line up with their noses pushing against the Ever Given’s side, trying to lever out the bow, while others pulled using cables. If the ship was suddenly dislodged, the smaller boats would be scattered like toys, risking a fatal accident. Then there was the risk that the Ever Given’s bow could swing sideways and collide with the opposite bank, going straight from one grounding to another. Elsayed asked the ship’s crew to run four 100-meter ropes out to land, where they could be anchored to stop the bow from moving out too far if it suddenly came free. He hoped that would be enough.

 

The Alp Guard roared into view on Sunday, March 28, almost six days after the Ever Given got stuck. There was a supermoon that night, a full moon unusually close to Earth, and its gravity would pull the Red Sea’s tide to the highest it had been, or would be, for weeks. If the salvage crews were going to free the Ever Given without unloading it, this was the moment.

 

Then Elsayed proposed a novel idea: Instead of using the tugs only at high tide, they could also pull as the tide went out, hoping the current would help bring the Ever Given clear. It wasn’t quite established salvage wisdom, which favors high water over tidal movement, but having battled the current for days, Elsayed and his team thought it might work.

 

The waters peaked at midnight. In the early hours of March 29, crewmen ran a cable from the ship to the Alp Guard. The tug was so powerful that they needed to coil the cable around four metal bollards set in the Ever Given’s hull to prevent the anchor points from fracturing under the strain. Then the Alp Guard began to pull.

 

As dawn broke with the tide low, some of the tug captains realized they were no longer treading water. They were moving, very slowly. The back end of the Ever Given was drifting silently, inch by inch, away from the bank. The bow remained anchored in the sand, but the ship was only half stuck.

 

The second large tug, the Carlo Magno, arrived soon after and joined the Alp Guard in pulling from the rear. For hours, both tugs went flat out, whipping the water into white froth. But they were now working against the tide. They quit at lunchtime, having made no visible progress.

 

Then the SMIT team suggested the Ever Given take on 2,000 tons of ballast water in its stern, to lift its bow a few extra inches out of the silt. At about 2 p.m., Elsayed ordered all the tugs to try again. The tide had turned, becoming their ally. As he’d suspected, it was just enough.

 

Elsayed was on the Ever Given’s bridge with Captain Kanthavel when the bow began to move, slowly at first, then all at once. The chief pilot could hear his tug captains yelling over the radio. As the ship drew away from the bank, one of the ropes binding the bow to the shore snapped, making a sound like a rifle shot. Then another. Then another. But the final one held, just long enough to stop the Ever Given from swinging across the channel. Elsayed asked Kanthavel to power up the engines and get the ship on a steady course so it could safely pass the salvage vessels ahead.

 

At the sight of the Ever Given moving under its own steam, the tug crews cheered and sounded their horns. On the bridge, the Indian officers whooped and embraced the SMIT salvors. Rabie called President Sisi to give him the good news.

 

Elsayed allowed himself the briefest moment of celebration. “Al-Hamdulillah,” he murmured: All praise be to God. He posed reluctantly for some photographs, then got back to work. More than 400 ships were waiting to enter the canal.

 

The rest of the world swiftly lost interest in Suez once the Ever Given was freed. But for Elsayed and his pilots, the crisis was far from over. A significant proportion of international trade was riding on getting the backlogged vessels cleared. The SCA team worked day and night to move them through, transiting as many as 80 ships daily. Elsayed knew that having tired, overworked pilots on the job increased the risk of accidents, but felt he had little choice. A few days after the Ever Given was freed, an SCA boat sank and an employee died, illustrating the dangers of working in a marine chokepoint under severe strain.

 

Clearing the queue took six days. Afterward, Elsayed returned to his home in Alexandria to see his family, his first break in more than two weeks.

 

In The Hague, Svendsen, the APM Terminals executive, had been preparing for a huge wave of cargo, trying to boost capacity any way he could. The company had agreed with unions to extend working hours, deferred maintenance that would take cranes out of action, and cleared storage space to accommodate thousands of extra containers. Rushing cargo through would reduce APMT’s already slim margin for error. “It’s like a Tetris game where there’s no blank space,” Svendsen said.

 

The biggest problem emerged in Valencia, in southern Spain. The port’s storage areas were already mostly full, piled with Spanish goods awaiting shipment. As containers came in, the volume of boxes became unmanageable. For a time, APMT had to activate a last-resort option, telling customers it could take in outgoing wares only just before they were scheduled to be loaded onto a ship. It would require a month of 24/7 shifts to bring the Valencia terminal back toward normal.

 

None of this received much attention in the international press. On social media, people bemoaned the loss of a welcome distraction from Covid-19. #PutItBack trended on Twitter. For most, the Suez Canal went back to being a largely invisible fulcrum of global trade. Within the shipping industry, though, after the euphoria of the rescue operation faded, the conversation turned to blame. Who was at fault for the crash? And who would pay for the physical and economic damage?

 

Captain Kanthavel and his crew were still on board the Ever Given, waiting for permission from Egyptian authorities to leave. The ship was anchored in the Great Bitter Lake—a desert salt bed for most of its history, until the canal’s flow transformed it into a waiting area for marine traffic. Although Kanthavel hadn’t spoken publicly, he had good reason to be anxious. After a major maritime accident, captains can expect a forensic examination of their actions. (Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, the company that provided the Ever Given’s crew, said in a statement about Kanthavel that it “maintains absolute confidence in our Master, who has acted with professionalism and diligence throughout this period.”)

 

On April 13, the SCA secured an Egyptian court order to “arrest,” or seize, the Ever Given. The agency said it was seeking almost $1 billion from the ship’s owner, Shoei Kisen Kaisha, which declined to comment for this article. In legal filings, the SCA argued that it had led a “unique and unprecedented operation” to free the ship and should be paid for its efforts, placing them at $272 million in expenses, a salvage bonus of $300 million, and a further $344 million in damages, including “moral losses.” Until the debt was cleared, the Ever Given, its cargo, and its crew wouldn’t be going anywhere.

 

On May 22, lawyers for the SCA and Shoei Kisen Kaisha gathered for a hearing in a crowded courtroom in Ismailia. A great deal was at stake, for a great number of parties. If the SCA’s nearly $1 billion claim was ever paid, the liability would likely fall not to the Japanese company but to a collection of marine insurance conglomerates all over the world. Each would want a say in any settlement. There were also more than 17,000 cargo containers still stuck in the Great Bitter Lake. Nike and Lenovo had sent lawyers to Ismailia to monitor the proceedings.

 

That morning, the courthouse was abuzz with news that the Ever Given’s owner had brought in a prominent attorney from Alexandria, Ashraf El Swefy, to stand up to the SCA’s demands. The hearing got under way at 11 a.m. About a dozen lawyers jostled around a lectern in front of four judges, standing shoulder to shoulder as if waiting for a halftime pep talk. They took turns speaking, each following the same theatrical routine. First, an attorney would come up, state his name, and set out his client’s case, building to a crescendo that involved shouting and waving his hands. Then everyone would talk at once, until the next lawyer found his way to the lectern and the process restarted.

 

The SCA’s lawyer argued that the authority had saved the Ever Given almost singlehandedly. A billion dollars wasn’t so much to ask. “If it were not for the refloating operation, we could have witnessed a catastrophe,” he said in Arabic. The call to prayer drifted in through an open window as he spoke.

 

Soon it was El Swefy’s turn. He was much older than the rest, hunched and with slightly trembling hands. Although the other attorneys towered over him, he had obvious gravitas.

 

No one could doubt the heroism of the SCA, El Swefy said slowly. But his praise was the prelude to a surprise attack. He explained that Shoei Kisen Kaisha had tried and failed to negotiate a settlement with the agency. In light of the SCA’s resistance, he said, he had no choice but to submit recordings from the Ever Given’s voyage data recorder into evidence. What they revealed was “chaos,” he said. “Enter, no don’t enter, the wind is high, the wind isn’t high.” The pilots got into an argument and were “calling each other names,” in an exchange so heated one of them threatened to leave the ship, according to El Swefy. It was the first time anyone had publicly suggested the SCA’s actions might have contributed to the accident.

 

El Swefy professed, as a proud Egyptian, to be making this argument reluctantly. “I didn’t want to say this, and I’m ashamed to say it,” he said. “This waterway belongs to all of us.”

 

When he went outside afterward, reporters crowded him. He unhooked his face mask and patiently lit a cigarette with one hand, talking into a cellphone with the other. He declined to comment when approached by Bloomberg Businessweek. “I have a principle,” he said in English. “All my statements are made in front of the court.” Would the full transcript of the VDR audio be made public? “Not by me,” he replied.

 

In the end, the judges kicked the case to another court. The SCA has reduced its claim to about $550 million, and as this story went to press, the Ever Given’s insurers announced they’d reached an “agreement in principle” to resolve the dispute, without disclosing its terms. Even if that deal is finalized, a protracted legal battle may still take place beyond Egypt. In London’s admiralty courts, where most big-money marine cases are decided, Shoei Kisen Kaisha has filed an application to limit its maximum liability from any lawsuits. The filing lists 16 entities that might seek damages, most of them the owners of other vessels stalled in Suez during the blockage. There could also be fights over financial responsibility among the owner, its insurers, and their reinsurers, who protect insurers against excess claims. The merry-go-round of litigation might drag on for years, to the delight of London’s legal industry and probably no one else.

 

 

Captain Kanthavel and his crew have now been floating in the Great Bitter Lake for about three months. According to the International Transport Workers’ Federation, a coalition of unions, they are still receiving their pay and are amply provisioned. Nine have been allowed to return to India. Seafarers’ groups are nonetheless anxious about their welfare; at one point, the Indian maritime union said it was concerned they could be “held to ransom,” becoming bargaining chips in negotiations that had nothing to do with them. The potential settlement is, therefore, excellent news for the crew. Once it’s complete, they and the vessel should be able to leave.

 

In a meeting with Businessweek at the SCA’s headquarters in May, Elsayed reflected on his role in this peculiar moment of nautical history. In the navy, he’d studied Operation Badr, an ingenious plan to move Egyptian forces across Suez in just six hours, allowing them to surprise Israeli troops and start the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He hadn’t quite matched that pace, but the SCA had managed to refloat the Ever Given in six days. “It’s the same,” he said, laughing.

 

Night had fallen by the time Elsayed offered to lead his visitors on a tour of the SCA control tower. Outside, the canal was a dark expanse, fringed by twinkling lights along the shore. It was empty: The next convoy wasn’t due to depart for a few more hours. Above the CCTV feeds, a digital map of the entire route was spread across 10 large monitors. Elsayed pointed to a yellow blob in the Great Bitter Lake, motionless on the screen, and said, “See the Ever Given?” —With Ann Koh

 

Read next: The Commodities Boom Is Luring Criminals to Make Bigger and Bolder Scores

 

 

 

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Covid Delta Recovery: Mario Draghi's Warning to Europe Is Right On - Bloomberg

Covid Delta Recovery: Mario Draghi's Warning to Europe Is Right On - Bloomberg

Mario Draghi's Warning to Europe Is Right On

The EU’s 750 billion-euro stimulus plan is a big deal. But with so much lost ground to recover, more ambition is needed.

 

By Lionel Laurent

June 25, 2021, 6:45 AM GMT+1

Italy's Prime Minister Draghi issuing his warning on June 18 in Barcelona

 

As the European Union’s leaders gather in Brussels this week to take stock of the bloc’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the feel-good narrative is gathering steam.

 

The shambolic start to vaccine distribution is a distant memory, with about half the EU’s population having received at least one dose. Cafes, restaurants and retailers are filling up again in Paris, Berlin and Rome as lockdowns are lifted — albeit with a wary eye on the Delta variant. And an unprecedented 750 billion-euro ($895 billion) coordinated stimulus package proposed a year ago is now reality, with European Commission boss Ursula von der Leyen embarking on a victory lap of the region’s capitals as national spending plans get approved.

 

Yet for all the confidence in the rebound that’s underway, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s warning last week that Europe needs to be even more ambitious on future spending — calling for all-in stimulus in the face of “protracted uncertainty” — is one that should be heeded as the euros start to flow.

 

Europe Lags Behind

Estimated number of years (from Q4 2019) to return to pre-pandemic GDP

 

The focus so far has understandably been on pulling out all the stops to stabilize the economy and preserve jobs as much as possible. The scale of the pain has been huge, with the EU hit by a record 6.1% gross domestic product contraction last year. Hence the “whatever-it-takes” mentality that’s slain a lot of sacred political cows, from the suspension of deficit-limit rules to the launch of jointly-issued EU recovery bonds.

 

Yet now the pandemic’s longer-term economic effects are hovering into view, from the heavy burden on younger generations to the urgent need to prepare for the disruptive pace of technological change — and that’s where Europe’s lag in terms of growth potential and investment is worrying.

 

OECD data suggests that while the U.S. economy is now back to pre-pandemic levels, as is China, it’s a different picture across the Atlantic. Germany is six months away from pre-pandemic GDP, Italy and France about a year away, and tourism-reliant Spain about two years away.

 

This matters for the strength of the recovery. As a whole, the euro area will likely still be below its pre-Covid growth trend in 2023-24, according to Bank of America economists. That will have an impact on confidence, employment and demand. It also stores up some future fights: While Draghi is trying to keep complacency at bay with calls to keep spending to create a “self-sustaining” rebound, Germany’s Armin Laschet — the front-runner to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor — is calling for a reinstatement of deficit rules as soon as the pandemic is over.

 

 

The emphasis should be on doing more, not less. Incoming EU stimulus plans are certainly a big deal in terms of confidence and investment: Bloomberg Economics estimates the program will deploy funding equivalent to almost 1% of euro-area GDP every year from 2022 to 2024. But we don’t know how much of what’s on offer will be spent fast. That’s dependent on countries’ ability to launch projects and get approval, or whether the end economic effect will undershoot expectations. Time is of the essence, given it’s taken the EU a year to get to this point.

 

On top of the risk of a widening gap between the EU and the U.S. — whose economy is deemed to be “on fire” — there’s the need for massive reallocation of resources to protect workers left behind by a shift away from fossil fuels and an acceleration of automation and technology. The EU has plenty of Airbuses but not so many Amazons or ARM Holdings.

 

The bloc has also regularly failed to hit its own targets for research and development, set at 3% of GDP. It will need to invest more to compete globally, Pictet Asset Management economist Sabrina Khanniche has warned.

 

 

One example is digital infrastructure like superfast and mobile networks. A Deloitte review of 20 EU countries’ stimulus plans published this week estimates only about 46% of funding needs through 2025 is currently covered, or just under 100 billion euros. This doesn’t include private-sector spending, nor does it cover all countries’ spending plans. But as a back-of-the-envelope estimate, it suggests in theory there’s room left over to double current spending plans in tech infrastructure alone. Another is the need to re-train workers: The study also warns that the spending plans are estimated to miss the EU’s target of having 80% of adults with basic digital skills by 2030, ending up closer to 58%.

 

These may seem like far-off issues. But Draghi’s warning comes from experience: It took a decade for Italian GDP to recover from the 2008 debt crisis. The past combination of underinvestment, pressure to cut public spending and rising debt levels serves as a cautionary tale.

 

The EU deserves credit for its pandemic action. But when leaders return home from Brussels, they’ll need to keep channeling that “whatever-it-takes” spirit for some time.

 

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

 

To contact the author of this story:

Lionel Laurent at llaurent2@bloomberg.net