By Bill Diem
By the time this reaches print on Wednesday, there probably has been a resolution of the blocked Suez canal, but it doesn’t take away from the fun I am having right now watching the news. I don’t suppose I should be smiling, but at the moment there is no tragedy, no one was hurt, and we can look forward to years of lawsuits and lawyers battling over who is responsible for an accident that cost the world economy $10 billion dollars a day.
That ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal on March 23, the Ever Given, is 400 meters long. That is as far as from Pickelman’s downtown gas station to Rahilly’s IGA, pretty much obliterating downtown Newberry.
The thing is about as wide as a football field, counting the edges where the teams wait in anticipation. Its deck is covered with 20,000 shipping containers, stacked nine high. The ship was coming up from the Red Sea, going towards Europe, and was in the narrowest part of the canal when it plowed its bow into the clay bank of Egypt and its stern swung into the bank on the other side.
This was a one-ship-at-a-time narrow place, so there was no accident with another one coming from the other direction, and no ship right behind that would have smacked into the stuck Ever Given.
Tugboats and front-end diggers and other special machines had budged it but not saved it last Saturday, and the 300 plus ships at either end of the canal were not getting to their destinations on time. Some had turned around and decided to go around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern edge of Africa. That added 15 days of sea travel, costing about $26,000 a day in fuel costs.
The ships that use the Suez canal carry 10% of the world’s economy, ferrying everything from Columbian cattle to car parts and Adidas sneakers. Someone told the New York Times that every brand name you know is affected by the delays.
Automobile factories used to stock extra parts in warehouses so they would not be shut down by non-deliveries. Then Toyota invented the “just-in-time” delivery system, where suppliers are obliged to store parts or time their own production so that it delivers parts just when the assembly plant needs them.
The Fukuyama earthquake and tsunami in 2011 took out a factory that made parts for automotive metallic paint, and the worldwide auto industry couldn’t make high-end Candy Apple Red for a while. That was an example of nature disturbing the best laid plans of men.
The Suez accident was probably caused by human error. At first people tried to blame wind, but other ships that size were not affected, and 30 had passed southbound and 12 northbound before Ever Given ran aground. Maybe we will learn more one day, but currently the owner of the ship, the company leasing the ship, and the company operating the ship are hinting that each other is to blame.
A long as people aren’t dying because of the accident, it is a comedy. It shows how puny we humans are, even with our giant ships.
Let’s rebuild that second lock at Sault Ste. Marie to avoid our own U.P. crisis.
