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A total of 119 vessels were still waiting on Monday to cross the Suez Canal, a week after this waterway was unblocked after six days blocked by the container ship “Ever Given”, according to data provided by a maritime services company operating in this passage.
At the entrance to Port Said, on the Mediterranean Sea, there were 63 ships and at Suez, on the Red Sea, 56, according to Leth Agencies, which has been providing almost daily the number of ships waiting to cross the canal throughout the crisis in the face of scant information on the matter from the Egyptian authorities.
The head of the authority that manages the canal, Osama Rabie, announced on Saturday that the more than 400 vessels that had accumulated at both ends on March 29, when the “Ever Given” was finally disentangled, had managed to cross the waterway.
However, the bottleneck generated by the incident has not yet been completely relieved as many of the ships that have continued to arrive since then are still having to wait to get through the canal, which has been operating at a rate of just over 80 ships a day in recent days.
According to Leth, in the seven days since the “Ever Given” was disentangled, 572 vessels have crossed the waterway, one of the busiest in the world connecting Europe and Asia.
Among those waiting to pass on Monday were 33 container ships, nine oil tankers, 29 bulk carriers, six livestock carriers and five vehicle carriers, among others.
The “Ever Given”, a Panamanian-flagged container ship of 400 meters in length and 224,000 tons of cargo capacity, operated by the Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen, ran aground on March 23 in the midst of a sandstorm and strong winds and became stuck in the southern section of the one-way canal.
This incident, the causes of which are being investigated, seriously affected the maritime transport of goods, forcing the suspension for almost a week of navigation through this waterway, through which more than 10% of the world’s trade passes.
