Egypt's president orders preparations for unloading the Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal

Source: Washington Post

Middle East

Egypt’s president orders preparations for unloading the Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal

By Sudarsan Raghavan and Jennifer Hassan
March 28, 2021 at 7:38 a.m. EDT

ISMAILIA, Egypt — Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi ordered preparations to be made for the unloading of the Ever Given cargo carrier that is blocking the Suez Canal, the head of the canal authority said Sunday.

Lt. Gen. Osama Rabie, chairman of the Suez Canal Authority, told Egyptian television that they were preparing for the "third scenario" of unloading containers from the massive ship so that it can be refloated and open up one of the world's busiest waterways which has been blocked for five days now and left more than 300 ships waiting to pass through.

Unloading some of the 18,000 containers from the towering ship would require special equipment so the president authorized obtaining it even while dredging continued, Rabie said, explaining that 27,000 cubic feet of sand had already been removed from around the vessel to a depth of 18 meters.

{snip}

The attempts to pull the vessel out of the sand and mud will be aided by the addition of two larger and heavier tug boats — the Netherlands-registered ALP Guard and the Italy-registered Carlo Magna. Both are scheduled to arrive on Sunday in the canal, said the ship’s technical manager, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement.

{snip}

Hassan reported from London. Heba Farouk Mahfouz in Cairo contributed to this report.

{snip}

Sudarsan Raghavan
Sudarsan Raghavan is The Washington Post’s Cairo bureau chief. has reported from more than 65 nations and territories. He has been posted in Baghdad, Kabul, Johannesburg, Madrid and Nairobi. He has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the 2011 Arab revolutions, as well as reported from 17 African wars. Follow https://twitter.com/raghavanWaPo

Jennifer Hassan
Jennifer Hassan is a London-based breaking-news reporter for the Foreign desk at The Washington Post. Before joining The Post as a social media editor in 2016, Jennifer was global community manager for the international chat app Viber. Jennifer honed her breaking news skills as the U.K. social media editor at MailOnline. Follow https://twitter.com/GuinnessKebab

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/suez-ship-canal-ever-given-stuck/2021/03/28/4bda3ee8-8f2c-11eb-a33e-da28941cb9ac_story.html

---

GuinnessKebab? What a great handle.