The Ever Given, the 20,000 TEU container that has been blocking all traffic on the Suez Canal since Tuesday, is one of the largest container ships in the world and one of the largest ships allowed to transit the Canal. In the shipping industry, it is referred to as a Suez-Max. The recent grounding of the Ever Given, in high winds during a dust storm, raises the question, are these ultra-large container ships too large to safely transit the Suez Canal? Put another way, for large container ships, is Suez-Max Suez too much?
What is Suez Max?
To transit the Suez Canal, a ship must be no more than 400 meters long. The Ever Given is officially 399.94 meters long, or roughly two inches shorter than the maximum. With a beam of 58.8 meters and a draft of 14.5 meters, the Ever Given is roughly 85% of the allowed maximum cross-sectional area of 1,006 m2. What this means in practice is that a ship with 20.1 meters (66 ft) of draft, the maximum canal depth, can have a beam no wider than 50.0 m (164.0 ft). A ship with a draft of 12.2 meters (40 ft) may have a maximum allowed beam of 77.5 meters (254 ft). The Ever Given fits in the middle of these criteria.
One other Suez-Max limitation is air-draft. No ship can be higher above the water than 68 meters in order to fit under the Suez Canal Bridge.
Windage, Wind & Dust Storms
While the Ever Given can fit under the bridge, like all large container ships, it has considerable windage due to the ship’s freeboard and the stacks of containers on deck. Based on the photos of the grounded ship with containers stacked up to 10 high on deck, the air draft of the hull and containers alone, ignoring the two deck houses, is close to 47 meters. For comparison purposes, this is almost the exact height of the masthead on the clipper ship Cutty Sark. Compared to the windage of the hull and containers on the Ever Given, however, the Cutty Sark had roughly 1/5th the sail area.
Windage is not much of an issue for the larger tankers and bulk carriers transiting the canal. When fully loaded, these ships have far less freeboard than container ships and none of the windage of deck cargo. This becomes critical when a container ship is caught in a dust storm with limited visibility and high winds as happened to the Ever Given on Tuesday when winds were reported to be gusting to 50 kph.
A High, Long Ship & A Narrow Canal
Crossing an open ocean is less of a problem on the Ever Given than maneuvering at 8 knots in the Suez Canal in a channel effectively half the width of the ship. When the dust storm hit the ship was in a canal with sloping sides, 313 meters at the surface and only 121 meters wide at its deepest. At Ever Given’s draft, the effective channel width was just over 200 meters wide.
In high winds, limited visibility, in what was a very narrow channel given the size and windage of the ship, it is easy to understand how the Ever Given came to run hard aground, wedged across the canal, blocking a major shipping thoroughfare.
Source: Suez Canal Authority
The Suez Canal carries an estimated 12% of world commerce. The current blockage is already influencing oil prices and could have a global economic impact depending on how long it takes to free the stranded ship.
Should ultra-large container ships be allowed in the Suez Canal? For large container ships, is Suez-Max simply Suez too much?
The betteer question to me is. Why hasnt Egypt bothered to make a second canal. If a second one was in place, traffic would still be flowing.
Hopefully the Canal Company will learn lessons from this and like local authorities will impose ship restrictions in the same way as is done for large open bridges in adverse wind conditions. Possibly required dredging has been neglected?
Re. previous reply see – https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/87948/the-new-suez-canal
When do we start asking the same questions about ultra-large ships and New York Harbor? We seem determined to accommodate these vessels and embark on another round of harbor deepening without any real understanding of the economic consequences, let alone the environmental ones.
“Why hasnt Egypt bothered to make a second canal”
Egypt is in the process of digging a second canal. The Ever Given was in the part that hadn’t been doubled yet.
hopefully the ship as well as the cargo are going to be released soon . Furtheron we have heard already about the paralell digging of a second suez canal partial under way , in construction . Wether these sort of ships are not well constructed or similar concerns , i will not be able to estimate . On the other hand , the anthropolists and the archeologists are going to jump one further question :
in the times before Christ there existed a canal , i think it was rom the Red Sea upwards . It got sanded (probably somewhere around these ages when the town of Nofretete vanished , the whole area of northern Africa turned from fruitable into sand areas), as nowadays sience has prooved .
Why there are no plans to reshape the ancient route oncemore ? Guess , what would be the decision of a Hetith Leader in such a case , or the husband of Nofretete ?
By the way , such building and construction efforts should reval a lot of places nearby the construction , where archeologists and anthropologists may show up their talents .
The case is simple. The ship is presently arrested or restrained or detained by the Egyptian Suez Canal Authority and will only be released against a payment of $1 billion. As the owner does not have that money, I recommend that the owner abandons the ship and declares a Constructive Total Loss for H&M underwriters to pay.