Suez Canal Authority via AP
- It's been over four months since the Ever Given got beached in the Suez Canal on March 23.
- It docked at the Dutch port of Rotterdam on Wednesday, after the Egyptian authorities settled on a compensation agreement and released it on July 7.
- The boat held up cargo traffic on the Suez for six days, but came unstuck after much dredging and digging.
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The Ever Given, which blocked cargo traffic for six days after getting stuck in the Suez Canal, has finally arrived at the Dutch port of Rotterdam, its original destination.
The boat docked at Rotterdam's ECT Delta terminal on Thursday morning, per Reuters. It will be there unloading its cargo until August 3. It will then move on to its next destination, Felixstowe, in the UK.
The mammoth ship was stuck in the Suez Canal for close to six days, from March 23 to 29 of this year. According to the Wall Street Journal, the boat initially set sail from a port in Yantian, China. Then it ran aground in the Suez, which is a crucial passage for cargo that accounts for around 12% of seaborne cargo trade.
Measuring more than 1,300 feet in length, the ship is slightly larger than the Empire State Building in New York. It took six trying days of dredging, lifting, and digging to get the boat unstuck, a herculean feat that was initially expected to take weeks.
During the time that the Ever Given was stuck in the Suez, ships were forced to abandon the Suez Canal and re-route, taking a massive detour around the southern tip of Africa.
Due to the unfortunate and very costly beached-boat situation, the global supply chain was thrown into chaos that lasted for weeks after the ship was freed. This was due to a logjam of more than 400 ships that had to be cleared through the Suez.
After the ship was freed, it was not free to go, however. The Egyptian authorities seized the Ever Given on April 13 and held it for months. It released the big boat after the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) arrived at an undisclosed amount of compensation with the ship's owner, Japanese company Shoei Kisen Kaisha.
The boat finally left Egypt on July 7 - with over 20,000 containers on board - a full 106 days after it first became lodged in the waterway.