The ship, stretching more than 1,300 feet, ran aground and blocked one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes, leaving more than 100 ships stuck at each end of the canal.
CAIRO — Trying to convey the sheer scale of the nearly quarter-mile-long container ship that has been stuck in the Suez Canal since Tuesday evening, some news outlets compared it to the length of four soccer fields. Others simply called it gigantic.
But the main thing to know was this: After powerful winds forced the ship aground on one of the canal’s banks, it was big enough to block nearly the entire width of the canal, producing a large traffic jam in one of the world’s most important maritime arteries.
By Wednesday morning, more than 100 ships were stuck at each end of the 120-mile canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and carries roughly 10 percent of worldwide shipping traffic. Only the Panama Canal looms as large in the global passage of goods.
“The Suez Canal is the choke point,” said Capt. John Konrad, founder of the shipping news website gCaptain.com, noting that 90 percent of the world’s goods are transported on ships. It “could not happen in a worse place,” he said, “and the timing’s pretty bad, too.”
The potential fallout is vast. The vessels caught in the bottleneck or expected to arrive there in the coming days include oil tankers carrying about one-tenth of a day’s total global oil consumption, according to Kpler, a market research firm, to say nothing of the rest of the cargo now waiting to traverse the canal.
