Ever Given

At 07:40 on 23 March 2021, in high winds and poor visibility, Ever Given sheered off course in the southern Suez Canal and drove her bow into the eastern bank. Four hundred metres of ship jammed diagonally across a channel barely wider than she is long. For six days nothing moved: more than 400 vessels queued at both ends, estimates put the value of goods held up at around ten billion dollars a day, and some carriers began routing 6,500 kilometres around the Cape of Good Hope.

The refloating on 29 March took thirteen tugs, specialist dredgers that removed roughly 30,000 cubic metres of sand from around the bow, and a usefully high spring tide. Egypt then impounded her for three months in the Great Bitter Lake while a compensation claim — initially $916 million — was negotiated down to a confidential settlement, cargo still aboard the whole time.

The ship herself is ordinary: a 2018 Imabari-built, Japanese-owned, Evergreen-chartered 20,000 TEU workhorse, one of eleven near-identical sisters nobody outside the industry could name. That is precisely why the grounding mattered — it took one routine ship and one bad morning to show how much of the world economy fits through a channel 200 metres wide.