As the traffic jam worsens, dislodging the massive ship blocking the Suez Canal could take ‘days to weeks.’

Cairo, Egypt. For the fourth day in a row, marine traffic through the Suez Canal was halted on Friday, with scores of ships stranded at both the north and south approaches to the shortest path between Asia and Africa. Efforts to free one of the world’s biggest container ships, which has been jammed sideways in the narrow canal since Tuesday, is ramping up, and although one of the teams in charge said it might take weeks, a consultant to Egypt’s president gave a more positive timetable.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-advisor Sisi’s on seaports and former chairman of the Suez Canal Authority, Mohab Mamish, told the AFP news agency on Thursday that traffic through the canal “will resume within 48-72 hours, maximum.”

Mamish said that he had “experience with many rescue operations of this kind” and that he knew “every centimeter of the canal.”
The SCA declared earlier this week that all canal navigation would be “temporarily suspended” before the hulking Panamanian-flagged container ship MV Ever Given could be re-floated.

The SCA stated Thursday, following a meeting with the Dutch salvage firm SMIT, which is assisting in the operation, that approximately 19,600-26,000 cubic yards of sand had to be shifted, reaching a depth of 40 to 50 feet along the canal’s bank, in order to remove the ship.

The SCA permitted 13 ships to reach the canal’s northern end from the Mediterranean on Wednesday, hoping that the Ever Given would be un-stuck soon and the other cargo ships could resume their journeys. Those ships, though, only made it as far as a lake in the middle of the canal, and they might not be moving fast.

Egypt has been using at least eight large tugboats and drilling equipment on the canal’s banks, but all efforts to refloat the nearly quarter-mile-long, 247,000-ton container ship have failed.

The SCA announced on Thursday that a “alternative scenario” will be implemented, with the vessels that entered the canal from the north on Wednesday “dropping anchor in the Bitter Lakes waiting area before navigation can be completely resumed.”

Taiwan’s Evergreen Marine Corp, which is leasing the ship from the Japanese corporation that owns it, hired the Dutch group Smit Salvage and Japan’s Nippon Salvage to consult with the ship’s captain and the Suez Canal Authority to find out how to re-float it.

The CEO of the Dutch company Boskalis, which owns Smit Salvage, Peter Berdowski, said on Thursday that it was too early to tell how long the job would take.

According to Reuters, Berdowski told the Dutch television program “Nieuwsuur” that “we can’t exclude it could take weeks, depending on the situation.” According to shipping reports, if the delays persist, ships can begin re-routing across the southern tip of Africa, which adds thousands of miles and about a week to the voyage.

Shoei Kisen, the Japanese corporation that owns the Ever Given, told The Associated Press that it was working with local authorities but that “the operation is incredibly difficult.”

“We are sincerely sorry for causing considerable concern to the ships that are sailing or are expected to pass via the Suez Canal, as well as all those concerned,” the firm said.

According to Reuters, up to 30 percent of the world’s shipping container freight usually travels through the Suez Canal every day — a trip that takes about six hours — amounting to about 12 percent of overall products exchanged globally.

According to the news agency, although the canal only facilitates about 4.4 percent of the world’s overall flow of oil products, a sustained outage might affect supply to Asia and Europe, and an impact on global oil prices seemed likely.

Meanwhile, the incident — namely the fact that a single, although very massive, ship has interrupted world commerce, and a picture of the ship’s hull dwarfing a lone excavator sent to try to dislodge it — has spawned a plethora of memes on social media. On his Wednesday evening broadcast, CBS’s “salty” Stephen Colbert also donned a captain’s hat to discuss the maritime crisis.

The Japanese shipping company Shoei Kisen KK owns the Ever Given, according to Toshiaki Fujiawara, the company’s senior managing director.
“We expect that there will be losses to be sought as a result of this crash,” Yumi Shinohara, vice manager of vessel management, told CNN.

“However, for the time being, we are concentrating on refloating/getting off the reef, and we still do not know the specifics as to which groups, how much damage, and how much liability, and so on,” Shinohara added.
“Because the vessel is chartered, the owners bear responsibility for the expenses incurred in the recovery operation; third-party liability; and the cost of repair (if any).”