Giant container ship ‘Ever Given’ freed from Suez Canal: Current Affairs Special Series

Team Adda247 and BankersAadda are here with a Current Affairs Special Series for SBI and IBPS interview 2021.  In this series, candidates will be introduced to current affairs topics daily, which will not only improve their general awareness but also will ensure that the candidates do not lack if any current affairs topic is asked in the interview. Today’s Current Affairs topic is the Giant container ship ‘Ever Given’ freed from Suez Canal.

Giant container ship ‘Ever Given’ freed from Suez Canal

For the last 5 to 6 days a Giant Container Ship named the ‘Ever Given’ had been blocked by one of the world’s busiest trade routes, called the Suez Canal which cost ‘billions of dollars worth of international commerce to the world. 

The ship’s insurers and the canal authorities summoned the largest tugboats in the canal, then two larger ones from farther afield. Rescue workers from the canal authority and the Dutch company named Smit Salvage were used tug boats to pull the rear of the ship from the canal bank. The tugs, dredgers were digging out sand and mud from under the bow of the vessel. Dutch company called in eight of the world’s most respected salvage experts from the Netherlands. Canal authorities were taking off some of the roughly 18 thousand containers to lighten the load of the ship. According to the data released by Lloyd’s List, the blockage of the ‘Ever Given’ estimated costs 9.6 billion dollars of goods each day or 400 million dollars an hour. It is one of the most far-reaching shipping accidents in history, the global supply chain industry will have a cascade of costly delays to contend with and much to assess: the size of container ships, the width of the Suez Canal is the wisdom of depending on just-in-time manufacturing to satisfy consumer demand around the world, and the role, if any, of human error. 

Some things which are not in human’s hand: one is the wind and the tide which might be deemed acts of God by the insurance companies, this incident is a reminder that 21st-century commerce remains subject to random acts of nature.