Evergreen has another ship aground, a year after blocking the Suez Canal

A huge container ship that was stranded for a month in the Chesapeake Bay, on the east coast of the United States, was refloated on Sunday (17), according to local media.

The ship Ever Forward, owned by the Taiwanese company Evergreen, ran aground in about six meters of mud, hundreds of meters offshore, on the night of March 13, after failing to advance into deeper water.

American media outlets reported that the boat resumed movement around 7 am local time (8 am GMT) on Sunday, after nearly 500 of the 5,000 containers that were on board the ship were removed to lighten the weight and take advantage of the higher tide. Of this month.

The United States Coast Guard had been trying to free Ever Forward for weeks, with the help of tugs and dredging vessels, as the massive ship and efforts to free it from the mire turned into a spectacle for tourists watching the scene. from the coast.

The cargo ship, which is approximately 335 meters long and has the capacity to carry nearly 12,000 containers, is one of many that cruise the busy waters of the Chesapeake every day.

The bay is a gigantic estuary, the largest in the country, and its shores are home to both the city of Baltimore and the port of Virginia, two of the three most important ports on the east coast of the United States.

The incident involving the Ever Forward on the Chesapeake is reminiscent of a similar episode with another similarly named freighter, the Ever Given, also owned by Evergreen, which became stuck on a sandbar in Egypt’s Suez Canal in March 2021, blocking traffic on this road, one of the most important in the world, for almost a week.​