THE human family stood still last week as the container ship Ever Given plugged up the Suez Canal in Egypt. It is estimated that the delay cost the world over one billion dollars per day as hundreds of vessels carrying everything from oil to basketballs sat idle, waiting their turn to transit the waterway between Africa and Asia. It will take months to get shipping schedules back on track and backlogged goods to consumers. The Egyptian government claims that the recovery operation alone cost one billion dollars.
The inevitable debate has begun. Do we really need such massive cargo ships, capable of carrying up to 20,000 shipping containers, and capable of causing so much disruption with a single grounding? Last year, at least five superships lost thousands of containers in the Pacific, amounting to millions of dollars lost and untold environmental damage. How big are these ships? Are they necessary? Some information will enable you to contribute to the discussion about these monsters.
When really big ships are talked about, someone inevitably brings up the Titanic. Is the Ever Given bigger than that famous liner? The Titanic was 883 feet long, about the same as three football fields. The Ever Given is 1312 feet long, or one and a half times the length. The Titanic weighed 52,000 tons, while Ever Given is 200,000 tons, or roughly four times as massive. So, the Titanic was a mere child compared to the container ships of today. Had the Titanic gotten stuck in the Suez, other vessels would have simply gone around her. Not so Ever Given, whose girth takes up nearly the entire lane, especially when wedged in diagonally.
Is Ever Given the largest ship ever built? No, but it and others in its class are close. That status belongs to Seawise Giant which, at 1500 feet and 260,000 tons, holds many records that may never be broken. Constructed in the late 1970s, it was the longest and heaviest ship ever built, and if stood on end, was taller than the Empire State Building in New York. It was the largest moving thing ever built, largest shipwreck ever and the largest thing ever recovered from the ocean when it was refloated and put back into service. Seawise Giant needed two miles to make a turn and over five miles to stop. Due to her size, it could not travel in the Suez Canal, Panama Canal or even the English Channel. With four million barrels of oil in its forty-six tanks, a spill would have been a disaster of Biblical proportions. The Giant was scrapped in 2010 in India, but the debate goes on about the utility of such monsters.
Are gigantic ships such as Seawise Giant and Ever Given necessary? Well, no, not in the sense that we cannot live without them. Humans survived for thousands of years before we started building these massive ships. So why have them? It is a question of economics. Ninety percent of the world’s goods travel on ships and the more cost-effectively we can move things, the cheaper they can be sold, everything from the fuel we pump into our cars to the ramen noodles we have for lunch. Ships that carry twenty thousand containers at a time require only one crew, one load of fuel, one insurance policy, and so on. If the same amount of goods were moved on two ships that carried only ten thousand containers each, the shipping costs would more or less double. Two crews, twice as much fuel, more insurance and so on. So, it is in everyone’s interest that shippers find ways to move the most containers in the fewest ships.
Will we reach a limit? Have we already? These are legitimate questions. When the Panama Canal was built a century ago, its dimensions were based on the theoretical size of the largest ships, not that were available but that were possible. We are way past that now.
BC Cook, PhD lived on Saipan and has taught history for 20 years. He currently resides on the mainland U.S.
