A new tugboat has joined the ranks of those struggling to free the giant cargo ship blocking the crucial Suez Canal maritime route. Syria, citing the blockage, rations fuel, and Lebanon warns of a similar problem.

With the costs of the closure of one of the world’s most vital maritime arteries growing by the day, salvage teams hoped on Sunday to take advantage of the full moon and swelling tides to dislodge the giant cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal.

Late Saturday, tugboat drivers sounded their horns in celebration of the most visible sign of progress since the ship ran aground late Tuesday:

The 220,000-ton Ever Given had moved.

Granted, it did not go far — just two degrees, or about 100 feet, according to shipping officials. But that came on top of progress in the days before, when canal officials said dredgers had managed to dig out the rear of the ship, freeing its rudder.

By Saturday afternoon, they had dredged 18 meters down into the canal’s eastern bank. But officials cautioned that the ship’s bow remained firmly planted in the soil and that the operation still faced significant hurdles.

The company that oversees the ship’s operations and crew, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, said a dozen tugboats were helping, the latest a specialist tug registered in the Netherlands, the ALP Guard, arrived on the scene on Sunday.

“Further attempts to refloat the vessel will continue this evening once the tug is safely in position along with the 11 tugs already on site,” the company said.

Several dredgers, including a specialized suction dredger that can extract 2,000 cubic meters of material per hour, were digging around the vessel’s bow, the company said.

Lt. Gen. Osama Rabie, the chairman of the Suez Canal Authority, said that water had started running underneath the vessel. “We expect that at any time the ship could slide and move from the spot it is in,” he told a news conference on Saturday.

Salvagers are determined to free the vessel this weekend, but their best chance may be on Monday, when a spring tide will raise the canal’s water level as much as 18 inches, analysts and shipping agents said.

It is a delicate mission. Salvage crews are trying to move the ship without unbalancing it or breaking it apart.

With the ship sagging in the middle, its bow and stern both caught in positions for which they were not designed, the hull is vulnerable to stress and cracks, according to experts. Just as every high tide brings hope the ship can be released, each low tide puts new stresses on the vessel.

Teams of divers have been inspecting the hull throughout the operation and have found no damage, officials said.

The ship’s manager said that in addition to the tugboats and dredgers, high-capacity pumps will draw water from the vessel’s ballast tanks to lighten the ship.

But with each passing day, the situation is bringing global supply chains closer to a full-blown crisis.

Vessels packed with the world’s goods — including cars, oil, livestock and laptops — usually flow through the waterway with ease, supplying much of the globe as they traverse the quickest path from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and the East Coast of the United States.

Some ships have already decided not to wait, U-turning to take the long way around the southern tip of Africa, a voyage that could add weeks to the journey and mean more than $26,000 a day in fuel costs.

If the Ever Given breaks free by Monday, the shipping industry can absorb the inconvenience, analysts said, but beyond that, supply chains and consumers could start to see major disruptions.

From the deck of a tugboat in the Suez Canal, where the Egyptian authorities allowed journalists to glimpse the salvage operation for the first time on Saturday, the Ever Given looked like a fallen skyscraper, lights ablaze.

Three boats that barely reached halfway up the word EVERGREEN painted on the ship’s side, for its Taiwan-based operator, had nosed up to its starboard side, keeping it stable.

A powerful tugboat sat near the ship’s stern, waiting for the next attempt to push and pull it out.

Together, the armada of tugboats — their engines churning with the combined power of tens of thousands of horses — have been pushing and pulling at the Ever Given for days.

Late Saturday, there was a brief celebration when the tugboats managed to move the 1,300-foot ship. The tugboats let the horns blow, hopeful that they could build on their progress when the high tide returned on Sunday, when the increased water level could help the ship break free.

With the ship too heavy for tugboats alone, the effort on the water was being aided by teams on land, where cranes that look like playthings in the shadow of the hulking cargo ship have been scooping mountains of earth from the area where the ship’s bow and stern are wedged tight.

As the dredgers worked, a team of eight Dutch salvage experts and naval architects overseeing the operation were surveying the ship and the seabed and creating a computer model to help it work around the vessel without damaging it, said Capt. Nick Sloane, a South African salvage master who led the operation to right the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that capsized in 2012 off the coast of Italy.

If the tugboats, dredgers and pumps cannot get the job done, they could be joined by a head-spinning array of specialized vessels and machines requiring perhaps hundreds of workers: small tankers to siphon off the ship’s fuel, the tallest cranes in the world to unload containers one by one and, if no cranes are tall enough or near enough, heavy-duty helicopters that can pick up containers of up to 20 tons — though no one has said where the cargo would go. (A full 40-foot container can weigh up to 40 tons.)

All this because, to put it simply: “This is a very big ship. This is a very big problem,” said Richard Meade, the editor in chief of Lloyd’s List, a maritime intelligence publication based in London.

“I don’t think there’s any question they’ve got everything they need,” he said. “It’s just a question of, it’s a very big problem.”
Sources:nytimes