It took five weeks and three attempts, but around 7 a.m. Sunday, the Ever Forward, a 1,095-foot container ship owned by the same company whose vessel blocked the Suez Canal last year, was finally freed in the Chesapeake Bay.
Loaded with nearly 5,000 containers, the Ever Forward was en route to Norfolk, Virginia, from Baltimore when it ran aground in the bay off the Craighill Channel on March 13, according to the United States Coast Guard.
“Initial reports did not indicate any injuries, contamination or damage to the ship as a result of the run aground,” the agency said in a statement at the time. The ship, which ran aground about 20 miles southeast of Baltimore, did not block the canal, it added.
More than two weeks later, after a week of dredging under the ship, the Coast Guard, along with the Maryland Department of the Environment and Evergreen Marine Corp., which owns the ship, made a first attempt to get the raft back. Their attempts were unsuccessful.
The next day they tried again, but the ship didn’t flinch.
“Salvage experts have determined that they cannot overcome the Ever Forward’s ground forces in a laden condition,” the Coast Guard said in a statement on Sunday.
On April 4, authorities announced a new plan: They would continue to dredge the sediment to a depth of 43 feet while simultaneously unloading the Ever Forward containers onto barges that would take them back to Baltimore.
Once the ship’s cargo was lightened, tugs and barges tried again to float while authorities continued to monitor for pollution. A naval architect and salvage master would remotely monitor the ship’s stability.
This new strategy would last about two weeks, the Coast Guard said, adding that it “presented the best chance of successfully floating the Ever Forward.”
Early Sunday, the attempt to refloat the ship finally succeeded, Petty Officer Third Class Breanna Centeno, a Coast Guard spokeswoman, said by phone.
In a statement, the agency said it had removed 500 containers from the ship and dredged more than 200,000 cubic meters of material from the bottom of the estuary that would be used to control the erosion on Poplar Island, a three-mile spit of land in the Chesapeake. bay.
The ship’s run aground was a “rare event,” said Captain David O’Connell, a commander of the Maryland-National Capital Region of the Coast Guard. “The vastness and complexity of this response was historic,” he added.
The Coast Guard would continue to investigate how the ship became stranded, Petty Officer Centeno said, adding that there were many possible reasons a ship could run aground.
The Ever Forward ran aground about a year after the Ever Given, one of the world’s largest container ships, broke free from the Suez Canal six days after it ran aground.
The Ever Given, which is nearly a quarter of a mile long, ran aground on March 23, 2021, blocking a channel believed to handle about 10 percent of global commercial maritime traffic.
By the time the ship was detached, 367 ships were waiting in line to pass through the canal. The accident was disastrous for the shipping industry, freezing nearly $10 billion worth of trade a day.
In a statement, William Doyle, the executive director of the Maryland Port Administration, described the task of clearing the Ever Forward as an “outstanding team effort” aided, he said, by “the rising Easter Sunday tide in the Chesapeake Bay.”
