By AP
Experts on Tuesday boarded the massive container ship that had blocked Egypt’s vital Suez Canal and disrupted global trade for nearly a week, seeking answers to a single question that could mean billions of dollars in legal implications: What went wrong?
As convoys of ships again began traversing the artery linking the Mediterranean and Red seas, hundreds more vessels sat idle, awaiting their turn in a process that will take days.
Egyptian government officials, insurers, shippers and others similarly waited for more details about what caused the skyscraper-sized Ever Given to become wedged across the canal’s single lane a few miles north of its southern entrance, on March 23.
When blame gets assigned, it could turn into years of litigation over the costs of repairing the ship, fixing the canal and reimbursing those who saw their cargo shipments disrupted. And with the vessel being owned by a Japanese firm, operated by a Taiwanese shipper, flagged in Panama and now stuck in Egypt, matters could quickly become an international headache.
“This ship is a multinational conglomeration,” said John Konrad, the founder and CEO of the shipping news website gcaptain.com.
Experts boarded the Ever Given as it idled Tuesday in Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake , just north of the site where it previously blocked the canal.
A senior canal pilot, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to journalists, said that experts were looking for signs of damage and clues to the cause of the vessel’s grounding.
Damage to the vessel could be structural, Konrad said. Stuck for days across the canal, the ship’s middle rose and fell with the tide, bending up and down under the tremendous weight of some 20,000 containers across its quarter-mile length.
On Monday, when workers partially refloated the ship, all that pressure fled to its bow, which acted as a pivot until the ship ultimately came free.