How the Ever Given Blocked the Suez Canal in 2021

Four hundred million dollars an hour. That's the rate at which world trade stopped moving on the morning of March twenty-third, twenty twenty-one. And at the foot of the thing causing it, there's a yellow excavator with a twenty-eight-year-old man inside.

The photo. Everyone saw that photo.

Everyone saw that photo. Hold on to him, because the story ends with him... and it does not end how you'd think. Seven forty in the morning. Sandstorm across the Egyptian desert, winds around forty knots. A ship four hundred metres long is moving through a channel that at that point is about two hundred and sixty-five metres wide.

So the ship is longer than the canal is wide.

Considerably. The Ever Given. Panama-flagged, Japanese-owned, operated by Evergreen, fifth in a northbound convoy, twenty thousand containers, Malaysia to Rotterdam. Then the steering goes, the bow swings, and she plants herself diagonally across the waterway.

Okay, but canals get blocked. Why does THIS become the most famous traffic jam in history?

Because about twelve percent of all global trade goes through that one ditch. Around fifty ships a day. Lloyd's List put a number on the stopped goods... roughly nine point six billion dollars a day.

A day.

Clothes, furniture, car parts, crude oil. Just sitting there.

That's the GDP of a small country evaporating while everyone stands around looking at a boat.

And that's what people missed. It looked like slapstick. It was a stress test of the entire system we buy everything through.

So who do you even call? Is there a giant ship removal service?

There sort of is. The owners hired Smit Salvage, part of the Dutch firm Boskalis. Their chief executive, Peter Berdowski, went on Dutch television and said the quiet part out loud. He called the Ever Given an enormous beached whale, and said freeing her could take days... even weeks.

Weeks. At four hundred million an hour.

The canal's about twenty-five metres deep in the middle, but it shelves up fast at the sides, and she was dug into both banks. Tugs alone wouldn't do it. You're talking about pumping out fuel and ballast, maybe lifting containers off, in the middle of the desert, with no cranes nearby.

Which brings us back to the digger.

Which brings us back to the digger. The Suez Canal Authority released that picture on March twenty-fifth. One excavator at the foot of a wall of steel, looking like a toy. The man inside is called Abdullah Abdul-Gawad.

And the internet immediately made him a meme. The digger was everyone's to-do list, or their coping mechanism...

One of them labelled the ship as my cellulite and the digger as a cup of green tea. He saw those. He told Insider he didn't find them funny. He said he was a little bit upset, that it felt like the world was laughing at his work... and that it made him more determined, because he wanted people to say, he did it.

Oof. That reframes the whole joke.

He'd been phoned and told, we need you in a car right now, you're the only excavator driver close enough. Twenty-one hour days. Three hours of sleep a night. One night, one hour. And he was frightened. He told Insider he was terrified the ship might list too far to one side... while he was underneath it.

Right. The funny picture is also a man standing under two hundred thousand tonnes that could fall on him.

In the end it took twenty-seven thousand cubic metres of sand dug out, fourteen tugs, Egyptian, Dutch and Italian, and the high tides. She came free at five past three in the afternoon on March twenty-ninth. Six days and seven hours.

And everything goes back to normal.

Four hundred and twenty-two ships were queued at both ends. The canal normally does fifty transits a day. They pushed past a hundred, and the backlog kept cascading onto ships that hadn't even arrived yet. Allianz reckoned the closure may have shaved global trade growth by nought point two to nought point four percentage points. For the year.

From one week. Of one ship.

And here's the part that's pure Money Mysteries. She got out of the canal... and then didn't get to leave. Egypt parked her in the Great Bitter Lake and effectively held her as collateral.

They impounded a container ship?

The Suez Canal Authority demanded nine hundred and sixteen million dollars. Salvage, lost revenue, reputational damage. It came down publicly to five hundred and fifty million. An Egyptian appeals court said it didn't even have jurisdiction and bounced it to a lower court.

Meanwhile the crew are sitting in a lake inside a legal argument.

For months. A settlement came in July. And the official cause of the grounding? Inconclusive. The wind was blamed, then the authority said the wind wasn't the main reason. One person died during the salvage.

So nobody ever fully agreed on why it happened.

No. But here's what it taught anyone who buys anything. Your sofa is cheap because it travelled on a ship the size of the Empire State Building lying down, through a hundred-and-twenty-mile channel with no spare lane. Efficiency and fragility are the same sentence read from different ends.

And Abdullah? Did he get paid?

Nine days after the ship floated, he told Insider he was still waiting on his overtime. The canal authority then said on Facebook that he'd been paid, plus a bonus.

Four hundred million an hour.

And the story ends with one man chasing an overtime slip.