Releasing Container Ship From Suez Canal Could Capsize It

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While the global shipping industry bleeds $400 million each hour the massive Ever Given container ship stays stuck in the sand of the Suez Canal, an elite team of salvors on the ground in Egypt is facing an entirely different problem: How do you make a top-heavy ship stuck in shifting sands weigh less without capsizing it?

“They’ll need a full survey of the seabed and canal bottom to see what the extent of grounding is,” Nick Sloane, the salvage master who miraculously led the removal of the Costa Concordia cruise ship in 2014 off the island of Giglio, told The Daily Beast. “The worst case is that the ship is presently supported over her bow and stern areas, meaning possible sags in the middle.”

Those sags could lead to the ship splitting in two, spilling the fuel and cargo—which includes COVID-19 supplies like respirators and personal protection equipment made in China en route to Europe—into the canal, making it temporarily impassable. “The risk is that it could also become top heavy and capsize,” Captain John Konrad, founder and CEO of gCaptain shipping industry website, said. “And that would be catastrophic.”

But before anyone can even think of lightening the massive vessel, which is 1,312 feet long and 194 feet wide with 50 feet of the ship below the water, they need to download the schematics of the ship and run them through a series of computer-generated programs to determine what offloading will do to the balance. Then they would have to somehow get a maritime crane to Egypt since the country does not own one tall enough to reach the top of the Ever Given’s 20,000 containers to even begin unloading them.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/releasing-container-ship-from-suez-canal-could-capsize-it/ar-BB1f0aBC