Shipping activities resume as 113 vessels navigate Suez Canal after six-day blockade

Cargo ships navigating through Egypt’s Suez Canal are now finding their way across the waterway.

Suez Canal is one of the world’s busiest shipping channels and the shortest shipping route between Asia and Europe.

This is coming six days after the Ever Given, a 200,000-tonne ship with the length of four football pitches, wedged on the canal.

The vessel, with the capacity of carrying 20,000 containers, was freed on Monday.

Speaking during a televised press conference on Tuesday, Osama Rabie, chairman of the Suez Canal Authority (SCA), said over 113 container ships have passed through the waterway since the Ever Given was refloated.

“113 out of the 422 ships that have crowded the canal since March 23 have crossed the international busiest navigation course,” he said.

Rabie estimated daily losses of the canal due to the six days blockage caused by the Ever Given ship at $12 to $15 million.

Besides the wind, Rabie said personal or technical error was a probable cause of the grounded ship.

He added that all the rescue equipment were belonging to the SCA except for two giant tugboats, one from the Netherlands and the other from Italy.

Meanwhile, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, during his visit to the Maritime Training and Simulation Centre of the SCA in Ismailia, said the blockage reaffirmed the relevance of the waterway.

He said the crisis was big but the problem was “solved without losses in the lives or the ship”.

“The incident of the Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal has reaffirmed the importance of the canal,” he said.