As ship gets moving, experts look at cause behind grounding

A container ship navigates Egypt’s Suez Canal on Tuesday, a day after the Ever Given cargo vessel was dislodged from its banks. Pic/AFP

Experts on Tuesday boarded the massive container ship that had blocked Egypt's vital Suez Canal and disrupted global trade for nearly a week, seeking answers to a single question that could mean billions of dollars in legal implications: What went wrong?

As convoys of ships again began travelling in this artery linking East and West through the Mediterranean and Red Seas, hundreds more idled waiting for their turn in process that will take days. Egyptian government officials, insurers, shippers and others similarly waited for more details about what caused the skyscraper-sized Ever Given to become wedged across the canal's southern single-lane on March 23.

When blame gets assigned, it could turn into years of litigation over the costs of repairing the ship, fixing the canal and reimbursing those who saw their cargo shipments disrupted. And with the vessel being owned by a Japanese firm, operated by a Taiwanese shipper, flagged in Panama and now stuck in Egypt, matters quickly become an international morass.

"This ship is a multinational conglomeration," said Capt. John Konrad, the founder and CEO of the shipping news website gcaptain.com. Experts boarded the Ever Given as it idled on Tuesday in Egypt's Great Bitter Lake, just north of the site where it previously blocked the canal. A senior canal pilot, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to journalists, told The Associated Press that experts were looking for signs of damage and trying to determine the cause of the vessel's grounding.

Damage to the vessel could be structural, Konrad warned. Stuck for days across the canal, the ship's middle rose and fell with the tide, bending up and down under the tremendous weight of some 20,000 containers across its 400-metre (quarter-mile) length.

Mar 23
Day the container ship became wedged across the Suez Canal

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