The Ever Given has been freed and is moving again after 6 days blocking the Suez Canal
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Connor Perrett,Mia Jankowicz
Mar 29, 2021, 21:57 IST
The Ever Given seen in a still from a Facebook live video by the Suez Canal Authority on March 29, 2021, announcing that it had been freed.Suez Canal Authority/Facebook
The Ever Given has been freed after spending nearly a week stuck in the Suez Canal.
Video showed the vessel moving again after a long effort to unstick it.
The ship is being dragged farther up the canal to an artificial lake for inspection.
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The Ever Given, the massive container ship that spent days stuck in the Suez Canal, was set free Monday, restoring traffic to the crucial waterway.
Boskalis, a Dutch company that worked with Egyptian authorities, announced in a statement that the 1,300-foot long vessel was freed from its position blocking the canal at 3:05 p.m. local time Monday.
This video, posted by the NBC reporter Raf Sanchez, clearly shows the vessel's movement:
According to the Associated Press, tugboats were able to pull the 220,000-ton ship from the bank of the canal where it had been stuck for nearly a week.
The Ever Given was stuck for about 152 hours. With the costs of the blockage having been estimated at $400 million an hour, that amounts to a total cost of about $60 billion.
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The ship's crew of 25 Indian nationals are in good health, according to Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, the ship's technical manager.
The tugs will now pull the ship to Great Bitter Lake - a wide body of water midway through the canal - where it will be inspected, the AP reported.
This livestream, posted to Facebook by the Suez Canal Authority, showed the ship after it had been freed.
It is unclear when the canal will reopen to ordinary traffic, the AP reported. But the backlog of vessels numbers about 400 and could take up to a week to clear.
The Ever Given became wedged in the canal at about 7:40 a.m. last Tuesday, blocking one of the world's busiest shipping routes.
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Smaller vessels were redirected along the canal's older, parallel route, but this was too small for the largest ships.
The exact cause of the grounding is still unclear. But high winds - common at this time of year in Egypt - were blamed as one of the main reasons the ship lost control and ended up with its bow and stern lodged on opposing banks of the canal.
The Suez Canal Authority worked fruitlessly with tugboats and excavation equipment for two days before partnering with the Dutch firm Boskalis on Thursday.
On Friday, authorities hailed a minor victory as the ship's rudder was freed. But it took until Monday morning for the entirety of the stern to be released, through the use of tugboats, the ship's own winches, and a specialist dredging ship that can move upward of 70,000 cubic feet of sand an hour.
Thirty thousand tons of sand were shifted in the effort, according to Boskalis.
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