CEO of Dutch Firm, At Suez To Rescue Stuck Ship, Says It Could Take Weeks

In the words of Peter Berdowski, CEO of Dutch company Boskalis, the container ship blocking the Suez Canal is like a “beached whale” that could take weeks to be rescued.

“We can’t exclude it might take weeks, depending on the situation,” Reuters quoted Berdowski as telling a Dutch television channel. Boskalis is a salvage company involved in the rescue.

The ship, ‘Ever Given’, got stuck diagonally across the single-lane southern stretch of the canal on Tuesday morning amid high winds and a dust storm.

Owned by Taiwan’s Evergreen, the ship, one of the world’s largest, is now blocking about 100 others on either side of the canal, making it one of the world’s worst traffic jams ever on sea. The canal is fastest sea route for trade between Europe and Asia.

Thousands of tonnes of cargo the ship is carrying is making the exercise complicated. According to the Reuters report, eight tugs are working to move the vessel.

Berdowski told the channel the ship’s bow and stern had been lifted up against either side of the canal.

“It is like an enormous beached whale. It’s an enormous weight on the sand. We might have to work with a combination of reducing the weight by removing containers, oil and water from the ship, tug boats and dredging of sand,” Berdowski said in the Dutch TV interview, according to Reuters.

Financial Times quoted John Glen, an economist at the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply, as saying that a prolonged shutdown of the canal risked severe disruption to supply chains in the U.K. and elsewhere.