At 07:40 local time on 23 March 2021, a sandstorm blowing across the Egyptian desert caught the container ship Ever Given in the narrow southern stretch of the Suez Canal. Winds exceeding 40 knots overwhelmed the vessel's steering, and the 400-meter-long ship -- one of the largest container ships in the world -- swung sideways, driving its bow into the eastern bank and its stern into the west. In an instant, 12 percent of global trade stopped moving. For six days, the Ever Given sat wedged across the canal like a cork in a bottle, while 369 ships queued at both ends and economists calculated the damage at $9.6 billion per day in delayed goods. Satellite images of the tiny excavator digging at the ship's bow became one of the defining images of 2021 -- a picture of human-scale effort against an absurd problem.
Ever Given was not new to the Suez Canal. Completed in September 2018 at a Japanese shipyard and registered in Panama, the vessel had transited the canal 22 times before the incident. It was owned by Japan's Shoei Kisen Kaisha, leased to Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine, managed by Germany's Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, and crewed by Indian nationals -- a chain of ownership so tangled it would later become central to the legal drama. The ship was fifth in a northbound convoy through the single-lane stretch, with fifteen vessels behind it, when the sandstorm hit. Researchers at the University of Ghent later identified the bank effect -- a hydrodynamic phenomenon that causes a ship's stern to swing toward a nearby bank in confined waterways -- as a likely contributing factor, along with the lateral force of the wind pushing against the ship's wall of stacked containers. Two Egyptian canal pilots were on board at the time, as required by law.
The canal carries roughly 50 ships per day and handles about 12 percent of global trade. When Ever Given blocked it, the consequences cascaded immediately. Over 300 vessels piled up at both ends, including 41 bulk carriers and 24 crude oil tankers. Some shipping companies began diverting around the Cape of Good Hope -- adding weeks and enormous fuel costs to their voyages. The first to reroute was Ever Given's own sister ship, Ever Greet. Oil markets tightened. Container schedules worldwide began to slip. The Suez Canal Authority engaged Dutch firm Royal Boskalis, through its subsidiary Smit Salvage, to lead the refloating effort. An international team of Egyptian, Dutch, and Japanese workers began dredging sand from around the bow while tugboats -- eventually fourteen of them -- pulled at the stern. Fuel and nine thousand tonnes of ballast water were pumped out to lighten the ship. On 27 March, a high spring tide pushed by a full moon gave the tugs their chance, and the ship moved 17 meters. Two days later, at 15:05 local time on 29 March, Ever Given finally broke free.
The ship was towed to the Great Bitter Lake for inspection, where divers found no structural damage to the canal itself. The backlog of ships cleared by 3 April. But the legal battle was just beginning. On 13 April, Egyptian authorities seized the Ever Given when its owners and insurers refused to pay the Suez Canal Authority's initial demand of over $916 million in compensation -- a figure that included $300 million for the salvage operation and, controversially, $300 million for "loss of reputation." The ship's 25 Indian crew members were effectively detained on board, caught in a web of maritime law, competing jurisdictions, and the labyrinthine ownership structure of modern container shipping. Two crew members were allowed to leave on 15 April for personal emergencies. In July, a formal settlement for an undisclosed sum was finally reached, and Ever Given sailed on 7 July 2021, stopping at Port Said for inspections before continuing to its original destination: the port of Rotterdam.
The incident exposed a vulnerability that the shipping industry had long understood but rarely discussed publicly: the world's largest ships were outgrowing the waterways they depended on. Modern container vessels had doubled in size over the previous decade, but the infrastructure of chokepoints like the Suez Canal had not kept pace. After the crisis, the Egyptian government announced plans to widen the canal's narrower southern sections. The Suez Canal Authority also disclosed that one person had died during the six-day salvage operation, a detail revealed only months later. In September 2021, the canal was briefly blocked again when the MV Coral Crystal ran aground, though that ship was freed within 15 minutes. The Ever Given incident had made the fragility of global trade viscerally real to a public that rarely thought about shipping routes -- and it did so through the unlikely image of an excavator, a stuck ship, and a canal that the pharaohs first dreamed of cutting through the desert four thousand years ago.
Located at 30.02N, 32.58E in the southern single-lane section of the Suez Canal, near the village of Manshiyet Rugola. The grounding occurred at the 151 km mark from Port Said. From altitude, the Suez Canal is unmistakable -- a ruler-straight line of water cutting through the tan desert between Port Said on the Mediterranean (HEPS) to the north and Suez on the Gulf of Suez to the south. The Great Bitter Lake, where Ever Given was towed for inspection, is the large body of water visible midway along the canal. Ismailia sits on its northern shore. Cairo International Airport (HECA) is approximately 130 km to the west.