A Ship Stuck in the Suez

moments of great calamity. The reason people are taking big risks today and finding new jobs that fulfill them is because COVID threw all of our values into question and made us reevaluate. A similar event happened that through the world once again into uncertainty, but may have been a lesson that came and went. So today we look back at the story of a ship, a canal, and some gusts of wind that brought a global industry to a

complete standstill. People like stuff. We love stuff. If you're listening to this right now, in your living room or your office, look around. There's a lot of stuff. Chairs, computers, paper clips, drywall, your phone, a coffee maker. If you were asked, hey, where did that coffee maker come from? You might say Walmart? But where does it really come from.

The truth is it comes from all over the world, different parts coming from different countries, being assembled in factories across the world, and crossing thousands and thousands of miles of ocean to get to that shelf at the Walmart fifteen minutes away from your door. And if your coffee maker breaks, you know you can go get another one. We are completely separated from the process of how we get this stuff we want, and most of us are probably totally okay with that as long as it's convenient.

Who really cares. But what happens when stuff hits the fan. A giant container ship is blocking the Suez Canal, One are the world's busiest waterways. The route is vital for the movement of everything from oil to consumer. Almost all the stuff around you in that room right now comes to you on ships. Many of those ships passed through the Suez Canal in Egypt, and on March the Siuez Canal was blocked. This ship is so huge it's as long as the Empire state building is tool and it

is blocking the entire witch of the Seouex Canal. Since it run aground on Tuesday, the ship was called the Ever Given and some of you probably remember this because it kind of took the world by storm when it happened during the six full days that it was stuck. Why did this situation even now In the first place, the entire globe was affected when this one ship with

crew members got stuck for six days. So today, instead of interviewing someone within the economic landscape, we're going to look at the economic landscape as a whole to talk about what the ever given being stuck in the Suez Canal says about us. I think most of us aren't aware of just how much global trade hangs by a thread. First, a little history. The Suez Canal was built and opened in eighteen sixty nine as global trade continued to intensify.

It's a long, narrow corridor that runs through Egypt, connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. Before that, ships coming from East Asia to Europe or to North America they had to go around the entirety of Africa. So by punching this canal through Egypt to the Mediterranean, the journey for ships was shortened by about six thousand aisles or ten full days at sea. This was obviously a game

changer for world trade. The Suez Canal connected the world in a time of science leading up to the Industrial Revolution, and was a historic milestone in human engineering and collaboration.

In a massive treaty called the Convention of Constantinople was signed by Egypt, most European countries, the Russians, the Ottomans, and in it there was a clause stating that the Suez Canal was open for any country to use quote in time of war as in time of peace, by every vessel of commerce or of war, without distinction of flag. The thing is, the Suez Canal became so important and so vital that, maybe unsurprisingly, it became a point of conflict.

Power struggles over the canal led to a major crisis between Egypt and Israel in nineteen fifty six, and then it was completely shut down during the Six Day War in nineteen sixty seven, closing for eight full years. The Egyptian government underwent a nine billion dollar project to expand the canal in certain parts in order to double the number of ships going through from forty nine ships a day to so By two thousand sixteen this construction was finished.

Global trade was booming, and that brings us up to modern day the age of clicking a button on Amazon and magically getting whatever it is you ordered in two days. Again. That stuff it comes on boats. Everything from oil, gas, your coffee maker, food, It all comes on boats. And twelve percent of stuff on boats, twelve percent globally comes

through the Suez Canal. On average, fifty one massive boats called ultra large container vessels or u c l vs go through the canal daily, roughly equating to nine billion dollars every single day. Until March, a ship called the ever Given was about to enter the Suez Canal. The ever Given is one of the biggest objects people have put on water. It's a quarter mile long. Ships have gotten this big over the years because consumers consume more

and more. But at a certain point, ships can't get longer or bigger because they wouldn't be able to navigate things like the Suez Canal. So shipping companies started stacking their shipping containers higher and higher on board. On March, the ever Given was headed toward the Netherlands, loaded up with nearly twenty thousand containers, stood fifty meters above the water, and was carrying about one billion dollars worth of goods.

It was a windy day, severe storm winds. They're often our severe storm winds in the Suez, and they were bad enough that day that some captains decided not to go through the canal. But Captain is non Cantabell, a very experienced seaman, decided to keep going. The reason he take the risk is there are huge financial pressures to get your cargo where it needs to be on time. The shipping industry is a just in time business, so Captain Canti Bell knew there was an enormous amount of

money riding on his delivery. From a bird's eye view, the canal looks like a straight shot through, pretty easy. But seafarer is going through it say, it's incredibly stressful. It's narrow, it's shallow. Any mistakes could have huge consequences. And there's a line of ships right behind you, also with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, and they're all in a hurry. So as they ever given enters the south end of the canal, the wind starts

to push the ship. Because ships like this stack their containers so high to make the trip worth it. There's a ton of surface area and the entire ships starts to act like a sail. The ship starts swerving back and forth in the narrow canal. The captain and the navigators on board are arguing with each other about what

to do. They decided to increase their speed, which the way that these ships work would normally give it control, but because of how narrow the channel is, physics takes over and the boat starts to get pulled towards the sides. The faster it goes. Orders are getting thrown around to go hard left, then hard right, back and forth, essentially fish tailing. And then one of these turns throws the ship out of control where a hard turn can't recover it, and the bow of the ever Given crashes into the

sandy bank. The ship is stuck in the front. Not only that, but the back of the boat swings across the canal and grounds itself on the other side. So now you have a boat that's a quarter mile long, diagonally lodged across the Suez Canal. The four hundred meter long cargoes ship, the ever Given is stuck in the Suez Canal and it is fouling up global trade. And it is also apparently the ship was stuck for six

whole days. And you probably remember this because it was a year into the pandemic and the story went totally viral, with every armchair expert and news anchor across the world all trying to figure out how to get this thing unstuck. It kind of confounded everyone, like how did this happen? And how was it so hard to fix? They eventually tried to dig it out, scooping out the bank at the front of the boat with huge excavators that just

look comically small next to this mammoth ship. A picture of one of these little excavators became a meme synonymous with trying to conquer a hopeless task. Every day the ship was stuck. All this stuff, these ships waiting to go through and deliver virtually anything you see around you, those all stopped. The delay is costing essentially four hundred

million dollars an hour. I'll spare you the minutia of how they eventually got out, But on March twenty nine, six days later, due to some creative engineering and a lucky super moon that pulled the tides up, Yes, a super moon, the ship eventually became buoyant enough and got unstuck. When it did. The innumerable ships and tug boats that

were on the canal all sounded their horns, celebrating. Over those six days, one ship with twenty five crew members got hit with some wind and got stuck in a bank and disrupted more than fifty four billion dollars worth of goods, affecting the entire global economy for months on end. The fact that this ship being stalled in the Suez is costing the global billions of billions of dollars by the hour is a reminder that this instance we have

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people matching their skills with the right jobs. At Express, we find people for jobs and companies of all sizes and industries, from the production floor to the front office. Sometimes finding the best new employee really is about who you know. Express Nose Jobs. Get to know Express, go to Express pros dot com to find a location near you. Okay, So the reason I wanted to tell the story of the ever Given for this season is because we are in this great transformation. When COVID hit in, it threw

everything we knew into complete chaos across the globe. It affected everyone this flu and as we exist in this new reality a couple of years into it, we can see that COVID really showed us how unsustainable and fragile this world is that we built. It's caused a lot of people we've talked to on this show to reevaluate what it is they want to do if they want to spend the precious time that they have working a particular job, because that's just the path that they chose.

It's made people want to take bigger risks because the quote safe standard options they've been following turned out to be not as safe and secure as they were made to believe. The ever Given getting stuck in the Suez Canal shine a light on the exact same thing that we've created, a rapidly moving world that can't keep up with itself and has real consequences because of it. The world's consumers keep consuming more stuff and we want it cheaper, and we don't really want to know or care how

it happens. What that means, though, is that more parts four things have to come from more places to keep the cost of things down, which means more ships. In the average number of ships passing through the Suez Canal was that average has almost doubled to fifty two ships a day. That's a lot more stuff in a short period of time. And we consumers still expect smooth delivery no matter how much strain we put on the shipping industry.

Just get us our stuff. When you look at a picture of the ever given, you can visually see how crazy this looks. One giant ship with a billion dollars worth of shipping containers stacked fifty meters above the water, operating in risky environments. It's kind of preposterous and really really risky. All companies account for risk and loss of goods, but now with so much product on one vessel, the loss when things go awry is huge, and today more

and more things are going awry than ever before. For one, as we saw with the ever Given. The more stuff on these ships, the harder they are to navigate, and again they turn the ship into a giant sail. Another byproduct of this overpacking is that it turns these boats into political targets. If one country has a beef with another and wants to see seriously disrupt their supply chain, targeting even one of these massive ships would have a

huge impact. Iran and Israel have been engaged in and on and off conflict where they harm each other's boats. This is happening, and the laborers that work on and depend on these boats are the ones that suffer greatly. The kind of demand, an extraordinary value placed on these boats and getting them to their destination on time causes extreme pressure on the captains that are in charge of

them and can really clad their judgment. Take Captain cant of Ball, for instance, Captain of the ever Given, he knew that there were dangerous winds going into the canal that day. It was so bad that other captains turned back. But there is so much commercial pressure for crews to keep on schedule and such huge demand from people at home buying things during the pandemic that he had to

weigh that against the safety risks. In a perfect world, the captain's priorities would be the safety of his ship than crew, But the rising number of accidents on the sea showed that ship captains are taking much bigger risks under financial pressure. We are in the biggest spike in maritime accidents in the last seven years, and three quarters

of those accidents are attributed to human error. Burnt out, overworked crews making small mistakes with huge consequences, Captains who look at heavy, dangerous weather coming and take it on instead of waiting it out because they can't be late. The general attitude is don't go around the storm, go through. On top of that, this weather is becoming more unpredictable due to climate change. Rough weather events are actually causing massive amounts of containers to fall off of these ships.

In over three thousand containers were recorded to be dropped into the sea, with that number is staying steady Over the last couple of years. Almost a hundred billion dollars in cargo was just lost overboard due to accidents like this. A hundred billion, and most importantly, these accidents are extremely dangerous and sometimes fatal for the cruise on these ships.

Being on one of these ships when huge stacks of forty ft containers are all toppling over during a raging storm stuff of nightmares, so much so that PTSD is pretty common among shipping crews because of things like this. The mishapps that happened in the shipping industry have a real human cost, physically and economically. And those mishapps are byproducts of a system we've demanded and one that is

constantly under an extreme amount of strength. When we buy stuff, we don't really think about how that stuff gets to us. It's truly just a marvel of efficiency and speed. Happens like magic, And while we don't have to think about it, what that physically looks like is the twenty thousand containers stacked on the ever given about to go through the Suez Canal, but the captain who wants to get that

stuff delivered on time despite the risks. The entire world was brought to a halt in when a virus broke loose, and we lived in a society that wasn't built to stop for a second and fix it. A year later, a global shipping industry was brought to a halt by some unfortunate gusts of wind and an economy that couldn't afford to wait it out. Most of the people we talked to in this show are reacting to situations just

like this in their personal lives. They're going about their day as they always did until something happens, and suddenly they realized that the way they're living isn't really making them happy, or it just doesn't make sense at all, and they decided kind of oud of desperation to change course into their own great transformation. Maybe the lesson here is that the ever given in our shipping industry have

not changed course. Ships keep having accidents, containers are still going overboard, and the Suez Canal is as precarious as it was two years ago, and we still just want our stuff. It's all proof that if a major calamity shows you the error of your ways, do you have the capability to get back on the water and make

those same errors again. But you don't have to. If you're in a job or a life that doesn't make sense, a house of cards that could fall to a gust of wind, you do have the choice to steer away and make a new course. If you don't, you could really get stuck for on the job. I'm Modus Gray.

Thanks for listening. Special thanks for the sources on this show, Elizabeth rows article in Foreign Policy and and Co's article in The Economic Times, and Bloomberg's reporting on the Ever Given music by Blue Dot Sessions mm hmm