On its sixth day trapped across the Suez Canal, the operation to free the Ever Given container ship is finally showing signs of bearing fruit.
Engineers "partially refloated" the container ship on Monday, with satellite data from MarineTraffic.com showing the ship’s bulbous bow, once lodged deep in the canal’s eastern bank, partly wrested from the shore.
Efforts to free the ship are being livestreamed, showing six large tug boats attempt to pull the giant ship from its position slightly mounted on the edge of the crucial waterway.
"The good news is that the stern is free but we saw that as the simplest part of the job,” said Peter Berdowski, CEO of Boskalis, the salvage firm hired to extract the Ever Given, noting that the toughest challenge remained at the front of the ship, where workers would struggle to haul the fully laden 220,000-ton vessel over the clay of the canal bank.
