Stuck in the Suez Canal
The Ever Given, operated by the Evergreen Marine Corporation, ran aground March 23 due to high winds from a sandstorm. The vessel is one of the world’s largest container ships. Fascinated by the story and curious about the incident, I tried to reconstruct the situation. The animation above is the most recent update thanks to comments by tweeps.
Reference material
Stitching satellite imagery of the area. |
Searching for cross sections of the area (suezcanal.gov). |
 Drawing the area in Sketchup.
|
 Using satellite imagery to pin point the location as accurate possible.
|
After tweeting the first animation, Suez Tug № 2 kindly shared the above engineering profile. It confirmed the 3:1 slope for the Southern part of the canal. Unfortunately at buoy KM 151 the situation is different:
John Scott-Railton kindly referred me to the nautical sonar maps on myshiptracking.com and showed me in the images above that the situation at that spot is very different than the previously mentioned engineering profile: “The actual canal is totally alive with silt and sand being pulled through…and stirred up by the passage of boats. (…) At buoy KM 151 the channel profile hugs the West canal bank, while the East bank of the canal is very shallow and silted (the blue part which is about 90 m). The boat is currently lying on a lot of muck (sand and mud) but.. the exact amount is probably only known to the people on scene.”
Based on the previously mentioned nautical sonar maps I generated a new cross section for the 3D model (B), which is indeed very different than the engineering profile (A) released by the authorities.
Below the water line of the #Suez canal. Incredible how narrow and shallow compared to mega ships like #evergiven. pic.twitter.com/1roMC91rDE
— frédérik ruys (@fruys) March 28, 2021