Suez Canal ship freed: Everything you need to know about the Ever Given drama

cNet ^ | March 29, 2021 11:08 a.m. PT | Daniel Van Boom

[SunkenCiv]

This page shows it’s now in the Great Bitter Lake. Hell, for six days, everyone was, some of them figuratively.

https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000

[rktman]

Time in USN, shipboard firefighting training, barge transporting space shuttle components across the Gulf and up the atlantic coast. Some interesting time at sea.

[Sacajaweau]

Sounds like you’re too young to remember the Suez Crisis in 1956. I was a young girl but sure do remember the headlines.

[rlmorel]

In 1952, my dad went to Korea on a West coast destroyer (USS Rooks) proposed to my mom via mail, and came back via the Suez Canal and Straits of Gibraltar.

On his way through the Suez Canal, he was on the open bridge, and a hawk landed on top of the very tip of the mast. It had another bird of some kind in its talons, and as it ripped away at it, the feathers floated down on top of the crew as they looked up, the ripped, downy feathers looking like just so much gentle snow in the desert!

[GnuThere]

I bet all the other ships are avoiding her like the plague - bad mojo!

[rlmorel]

I posted this on another thread about the Ever Given, I have always been fascinated by salvage, and this was an interesting one:

Whenever I hear of a ship running aground, I am reminded of the famous grounding of the USS Missouri on January 17, 1950.

Granted, these waters in the Suez Canal are tighter and shallower (but navigation through the canal is far more highly ritualized and overseen) and the Ever Given is far bigger, but the grounding of the USS Missouri was epic in aspects of dysfunction, embarrassment, and the fastness of the grounding.

The grounding of the Ever Given can be attributed to perhaps inattention coupled with an untimely gust of wind (or in some quarters, a deliberate grounding) but the grounding of the Missouri is juicy with...hubris.

On the morning of January 17, 1950, the USS Missouri left Norfolk for only the second time under her new captain, CAPT William Brown, and on her way out, was to conduct an exercise where she would steam past some experimental acoustic devices that would record her screws which they were trying to use to identify ships.

Captain Brown ordered the speed increased to 15 knots, which for this area of water was considered quite fast for a ship of that size, and when one of the officers made his opinion known, the Captain ignored him and overrode him.

Down in the chart room, the officers in charge of navigation were puzzled both by the speed and the trajectory of the ship which was (to them) taking them into shoal water. One of the navigation officers looked out the port hole and saw a navigation buoy and knew they were going on the wrong side of the buoy, basically cutting the corner ACROSS the shoals.

Multiple people with more experience in the area realized what was going on and tried to tell Captain Brown, who repeatedly ignored them or that they had no idea where they were.

When the ship hit the mud in the shoals, the angle of the bottom was so shallow, and the mud so slick that nobody even felt the ship going aground. Something amiss was noted when men on the stern saw muddy water being churned up by the screws, and almost simultaneously, the salt water intakes for cooling water for the engines clogged and temperatures began to rise. It all happened so softly and gradually that the ship had gone aground 2500 feet before finally stopping that most of the crew did not even realize they had run aground!

It was that slick mud that served as a "lubricant", and raised the entire ship several feet out of the water, after which it began to settle back, and the sticky mud encased the entire hull, grasping it tightly.

Worse (if possible) she had run aground at an unusually high tide, which as anyone knows, is very bad. To make things even worse, she was fully loaded with both fuel and ammunition which brought her displacement up to 57,000 tons.

She wasn't aground, she was...ashore, by more than two ship lengths worth! Just as bad from a publicity perspective, she was aground in full view of a major heavily travelled roadway. There she would stay for two weeks.

They brought Admiral Homer Wallin in who had been instrumental in the salvage efforts at Pearl Harbor, and his straightforward plan involved the obvious steps:

• Remove as much weight as possible from the battleship

• Lift the ship

• Remove as much sand as possible from around the battleship

• Use the combined power of the area's tugboats to pull the battleship

• Dredge the channel to provide deep water for Missouri to reenter the shipping lane

But after offloading all her fuel, ammunition, food, water, anchors, and even her anchor chains, they were unsuccessful.

They added even more pontoons, and had divers all along both sides of the hull with pressure water hoses trying to dislodge mud adhering to the hull like cement, as tugboats above on port and starboard sides alternately applied pressure to rock the hull from side to side, as tugs fore and aft pushed and pulled at the same time.

I cannot imagine how dangerous that must have been for those divers.

Politically, it became intolerable for the Navy.

An Army helicopter darted in (under full view of the Press and civilians on the side of the highway, watching) and lowered a line with a sign saying something like "Need a hook?" and even the Soviet Union piled on from afar.

Heads rolled. As they should have.

[damper99]

Since the Japanese surrender had been signed on the deck of the USS Missouri, she became known as the “Mudbank Maru” after this incident.

[rlmorel]

Boy, the Navy took a public relations pasting on that one...

When you look at all that went wrong...I guess all ship collisions and groundings have that feel to them...that there were so many signposts and warnings, and people deliberately ignored them!

[SunkenCiv]

[Spktyr]

At typical merchantman speeds of about 12kts, it’s a bit over 13 days from Suez (the city, not the canal) to Amsterdam, but 41 days if you have to sail around Africa.

[Spktyr]

All you have to do to make the Suez Canal unusable is stop dredging for a few months.

If they nuked a cargo ship, you’d get a big crater but the remains wouldn’t block the canal. Ships could sail around it in the crater once it cooled off. The canal is a surface level one surrounded by flat land/desert so making a crater just means there’s a new turning basin in the canal. There’s no locks to destroy either.

[Spktyr]

Um, no. The Zumwalt hit the banks of the Panama Canal because it suffered an engineering casualty that left it drifting, powerless. Can’t steer a modern destroyer that’s lost propulsion and bow thrusters (latter as applicable.)

https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/zumwalt-breaks-panama-canal/?fb_comment_id=1044589955649310_1045265938915045

[Spktyr]

Um, yes. Take it up with the article author.

[FreedomPoster]

>>Not a big fan of Kipling but the others for sure.

Go read the Gods of the Copybook Headings carefully and rethink that.

[sport]

You don’t know what you are missing as far as not being a fan of Kipling.

[linMcHlp]

Thank you, but the rest of the story, about succeeding to slip the ship back into navigable waters, is missing.

[rlmorel]

Of course, I was completely focused on the grounding aspects and the efforts that they used to refloat her.

If you want a lot of good and detailed information about this including the actual reflecting, check out this link: Disasterous History: The Infamous Grounding of The USS Missouri

I really enjoyed the way the story was told here!

[Cold Heart]

Latest info from the Suez canal administration is that they will not impose any restrictions on the travel of the super container ships. No changes

[Spktyr]

There’s really nothing they *can* do. It wasn’t caused due to congestion and there are literally hundreds of ships built to Suezmax dimensions these days. The ships also can’t stop and moor up for every sandstorm.

[A Formerly Proud Canadian]

Hand? There was a hand? Who knew? 😜