The Bobby Bones Show - A Ship Stuck in the Suez

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

In March of 2021, the shipping freighter Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal for six days and captivated the world. In this episode, we dive into what the event says about our economy, and what it says about us.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Airtasker, get anything done? Welcome to On the Job. This season, we're focusing on how people and businesses are getting back to work. Let's call it a great transformation, a change in the way workers are thinking. Employers need people to work more than ever, putting laborers in a sort of position of power. We'll be hearing from people navigating this new normal for themselves as they find their life's work. Great transformations come after 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. Well, in 2021, a similar event happened that through the world once again into unsubilies. certainty, 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'd 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 15 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 the 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 of the world's busiest waterways. The route is vital for the movement of everything from oil to consumer goods. 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 23, 2021, the Suez Canal was blocked. This ship is so huge. It's as long as the Empire State Building is tall, and it is blocking the entire width of the Suez Canal since it ran 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-fold days that it was stuck. Why did this situation even occur in the first place? The entire globe was affected when this one ship with 25 groups, 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 1869 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 6,000 miles, or 10 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 1888, 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 1956, and then it was completely shut down during the Six-Day War in 1967, closing for eight full years.

In 2014, the Egyptian government underwent a $9 billion project to expand the canal in certain parts in order to double the number of ships going through. From 49 ships a day to 97. So by 2016, 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 12% of stuff on boats, 12% globally, comes through the business. Suez Canal. On average, 51 massive boats called ultra-large container vessels or UCLVs go through the canal

daily, roughly equating to $9 billion every single day. Until March 23, 2021. 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 23rd, 2021, the Evergiven was headed toward the Netherlands, loaded up with nearly 20,000 containers, stood 50 meters above the water, and was carrying about $1 billion worth of goods. It was a windy day. Severe storm winds. There are often are severe stormwinds in the Suez, and they were bad enough that day that some captains decided not to go through the canal. But Captain Krishnan Canterval, 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 Canthe-Val 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 seafarers 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 the 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 ship 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 decide 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 400 meter long cargo 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 to live, river, virtually anything you see around you, those all stopped. The delays costing essentially $400 million an hour. I'll spare you the minutia of how they eventually got out, but on March 29th, 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 tugboats that were on the canal all sound of their horns celebrating. Over those six days, one ship, but 25 crew members got hit with some wind and got stuck in a bank and disrupted more than $54 billion 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 globe billions of billions of dollars by the hour is a reminder that the systems we have in place are not particularly resilient.

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Sometimes finding the best new employee really is about who you know. Express knows jobs. Get to know Express. Go to ExpressPros.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 2020, 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 for things have to come from more places

to keep the cost of things down, which means more ships. In 1975, the average number of ships passing through the Suez Canal was 27. In 2019, that average has almost double to 52 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 50 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 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 and extraordinary value placed on these boats and getting that, them to their destination on time causes extreme pressure on the captains that are in charge of them and can really cloud their judgment. Take Captain Cantavall, for instance, Captain of the Evergiven. 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 professional, perfect world, the captain's priorities would be the safety of his ship and crew. But the rising

number of accidents on the sea show 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 2020, over 3,000 containers were recorded to be dropped into the sea, with that number

staying steady over the last couple of years. In 2021, 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 crews on these ships. Being on one of these ships, when huge stacks of 40-foot containers are all toppling over during a raging storm, it's the stuff of nightmares. So much so that PTSD is pretty common among shipping crews because of things like this.

The mishaps that happen in the shipping industry have a real human cost, physically and economically. And those mishaps are byproducts of a system we've demanded and one that is constantly under an extreme amount of strain. 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 20,000 containers. stacked on the ever-given about to go through the Suez Canal, with a captain who wants to get that stuff delivered on time,

despite the risks. The entire world was brought to a halt in 2020 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 situational. just like this in their personal lives. They're going about their day, as they always did, until something happens.

And suddenly they realize 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 out 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, 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 gun, 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 Otis Gray. Thanks for listening. Special thanks for

the sources on this show, Elizabeth Brow's article in Foreign Policy, and Ann Coe's article in The Economic Times, and Bloomberg's reporting on The Ever Given. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. All right, if you have ever dealt with a traditional home security company, you know the drill, expensive monthly fees, contracts that lock you in for years, and waiting around for a technician to set everything up. It's a lot. Well, now they're SimplySafe. They have completely changed the game. SimplySafe has no long-term contracts, no hidden fees, no being trapped.

They earn your business by actually keeping you safe, not by locking you in. Setting up is so easy. You customize your system at SimplySafe.com. It ships to your door in a few days, and with the app guided setup, You can have everything installed and armed in under an hour. No technician needed. And it's not just a camera. It's a full ecosystem of sensors, cameras for inside and outside, and 24-7 professional monitoring.

If there's ever a break-in, a fire, or a flood, SimplySafe's agents are on it immediately. They were also named America's Best Customer Service by Newsweek, which honestly tracks. Right now, you can get 50% off your new system by visiting Simplysafe.com slash bones. That's half off at simplysafe.com slash bones. There's no safe like SimplySafe. With Air Tasker, your weekends are a lot less busy. I need someone to fix the wobbly office chair, screen print teas for my kid's metal band,

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