Stuck! The cautionary tale of giant container ship Ever Given

Olivier Lemaire - General Manager of AIVP Nobody ever talks about it when the trains run on time... Nor does anyone talk about the 50,000 merchant ships sailing the oceans every day. But when a vast, 400 metre-long container ship blocks the Suez Canal, her prow lodged in the Egyptian sand, it provokes a press and social media storm. The world suddenly realises that what they had always assumed to be a well-oiled global maritime shipping machine, is in fact at the mercy of a gust of sandy desert wind! Is this another shot across the bows for shipping lines in their race for ever-bigger vessels? The images, shared widely on social media, are striking. Ever Given’s extraordinary size is usually lost in the vastness of the ocean, or at the far ends of now inaccessible container terminals. But it takes on a whole new dimension when seen alongside the land machines (themselves impressive in scale) sent to dig the ship, and as some hasty writers would have it, global trade in its entirety, out of the hole in which she found herself. The incident has brought home to the entire world the dizzying proportions that global trade freighters have reached in recent decades. It has also served as a reminder of just…