The Ever Given, a 400-meter (1,312 foot) container ship, Tuesday became stuck in the canal sideways, with its bow wedged in one bank and its stern nearly touching the other, according to ship operators and images posted on social media. The ship, operated by Taiwan-based Evergreen Group, is one of the world’s biggest ocean vessels. It can move more than 20,000 containers and is taller than the Empire State Building if turned upright.

The ship, which sails under a Panamanian flag, was headed for Rotterdam, Netherlands, from the Yantian District of China.
Since its grounding became big news, we were able to utilize our VisibilityCloud solutions to determine which other shipments and the backlog of shipments to come.

Greg Knowler, editor at JOC suggests that “An option for shipping lines is to reroute vessels around Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, but that will add more than 3,000 nautical miles and another week to the transit time from Asia to Europe. Ships will also have to speed up to maintain their weekly schedules, and an increase of 2 knots over five days of extra steaming will burn an additional 1,000 tons of fuel.”
Officials attributed the accident to high winds and sandstorms. Sandstorms are not unusual at this time of year in Egypt. Reports also suggest that the ship’s power failed, leading to drift from its course.
It is estimated the Ever Given will take at least two days to be pulled free, and at 400 metres, the container ship is too long to allow other vessels to pass. This is leading to a rapid build-up of ships both in the Red Sea heading north, and in the Mediterranean heading south. Even a two days delay would further add to the supply chain disruption slowing the delivery of cargo to businesses across the UK and Europe.
Lost shipments are a thing of the past!
Supply chain disruption is inevitable and will happen. There are many factors at play when shipping goods across oceans but having real time, in depth logistics visibility across your own global supply chain helps companies with decision-making technology for their scheduling, routing and capacity control, along with connecting importers and exporters to shipment booking and tracking capabilities.
Freightgate VisibilityCloud provides businesses to mitigate, plan, and adapt with a powerful logistics visibility solution designed to sharpen your competitive edge by providing tracking and tracing and event management information along the entire logistics Lifecycle. VisibilityCloud lets you utilize the Cloud-based Internet to collaborate with your customers and trading partners by sharing vital shipping information. It enables all parties to simultaneously update the status of a shipment or to track a shipment by multiple parameters including Billing Reference, Shipper Reference, Consignee Reference, PO Numbers, Shipment Status, Date Range and much more. By providing a vehicle to incorporate freight costs with inventory carrying costs and other cost components.
The Freightgate Team excels at finding innovative solutions to Shipment Visibility Management Problems for transport carriers, freight forwarders, 3PLs and NVOCCs with our vast arsenal of flexible cloud technology tools — take a logistics cloud demo today!