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
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