Suez Canal Blocked in Both Directions After Massive Shipping Container Gets Stuck

On Tuesday, the Suez Canal, one of the biggest waterways on the planet, had traffic clog up because a massive container ship (the Ever Given) got stuck.

At the risk of either patronizing you or giving you a geography lesson, the 120-mile-long man-made passage connects the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Trade goes both ways (duh) but the waterway is commonly used by companies looking to take oil from the Middle East to North America/Europe. 

As of Tuesday afternoon tug boats were trying to clear the vessel so that the pileup of ships that have collected on both sides as a result can be on their way. As of 1 a.m. local time it wasn’t clear if things were back to normal or not. 

The Ever Given is reportedly over 1,300 ft. long, and weighs 220,000 metric tons. For those more about visuals than numbers, here you go:

The Guardian writes that the ship is holding hundreds of containers intended to go to Rotterdam, Netherlands from China.

“Hopefully it won’t be too long but from the looks of it that ship is super stuck,” said a passenger of another ship who’s watched the whole thing. “They had a bunch of tugs trying to pull and push it earlier but it was going nowhere … there is a little excavator trying to dig out the bow.”

Looks very aggravating.