Here’s what you need to know about Suez Canal Crisi

The traffic jam at the Suez Canal began easing but the giant container blocked the crucial passageway for a week long which caused headaches for the shippers around the globe. 

Ever Given, a 400-meter long container ship was freed from the Suez Canal, the manmade waterways which are heavily used by ships, on March 29, 2021. The Suez Canal carry over 12 percent of water trade by volume. The giant container, Ever Given, is owned by Japan’s Shoen Kisen Kaisha Ltd which ran aground on March 23, 2021 in southern part of the canal. 

Global supply chain where already under pressure when the Ever Given, the ship equal to the height of Empire state building which could carry 20 thousand apartments blocked the passageway. A.P Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, said that the disruptions and the chaos in global shipping could take weeks or possible months to unravel. 

The crisis was just a week, but it was also years in the amking. 

For years, the shipping companies are making bigger vessels, containers, by expanding global appetite for goods. The growth is ship sizes have been sped up in years, which usually made economic sense. Largest ships are generally cheaper but cause different problems for canals, ports to handle them but also for the companies who build them. However the big problems they might cause, these massive vessels still impact a lot on global shipping. 

According to the latest news reports, Egypt on Wednesday said that it made seek up to $1 billion after the Ever Given choke off international trade through the Suez Canal for almost a week. Osama Rabie, Suez Canal Authority Chief Executive, said that the amount is an estimate of the losses to transit fees, damages during dredging and salvage efforts. 

‘This is the right of the country, and it shall get its due’, said the Chief Executive. 

The Suez Canal Authority (SCA) said that the shipping is back to normal with total 81 ships in the canal now, on Wednesday. 

An 80-metre-long vessel called Elise which went across River Arun in West Sussex on April 01, 2021, has sparked comparison of the blocked Ever Given container ship in the Suez Canal for a long week. Social media users are flooding with similarities between the situations in West Sussex and Suez Canal. However, unlike the giant Ever Given container, Elise was moved on just after hours.