Suez Canal: Stuck container ship set free and on the move

 

A huge container ship blocking Egypt’s Suez Canal for nearly a week has been set free and is on the move, a salvage firm has said.

Helped by the peak of high tide, a flotilla of tugboats managed to wrench the bulbous bow of the skyscraper-sized Ever Given from the canal’s sandy bank, where it had been firmly lodged since last Tuesday.

After hauling the fully-laden 220,000-ton vessel over the canal bank, the salvage team was pulling the vessel toward the Great Bitter Lake –  a wide stretch of water halfway between the north and south end of the canal – where the ship will undergo technical inspection, canal authorities said.

Satellite data from MarineTraffic.com confirmed that the ship was moving away from the shoreline toward the centre of the artery.

“We pulled it off!” said Peter Berdowski, chief executive of Boskalis, the salvage firm hired to extract the Ever Given, in a statement. “I am excited to announce that our team of experts, working in close collaboration with the Suez Canal Authority, successfully refloated the Ever Given... thereby making free passage through the Suez Canal possible again.”