In March 2021 the four-hundred-meter Ever Given swung sideways in the Suez Canal and jammed itself diagonally across the entire waterway. Most reports blamed a sudden windstorm, but wind alone doesn’t explain a pull that kept growing the longer the ship turned.
In the narrow gap between the hull and the canal’s bank, water forced through that gap sped up and its pressure dropped, dragging the stern toward the bank while the bow swung the opposite way. As the ship rotated, the gap narrowed further, so the pull kept growing — a feedback loop wind could only start, not finish. The same bank effect grows stronger as ships get bigger while canal widths stay fixed. It blocked the canal for six straight days, and roughly $9.6 billion a day in trade sat frozen behind it the whole time.
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Is this called physics, or more properly hydrodynamics?
What gets me isn't the forty-knot wind everyone blamed — it's that the wind only started the turn. Once the Ever Given began rotating, the narrowing gap between hull and bank did the rest by itself, feeding a pull that kept growing on its own for six straight days.
If a single gust can trigger a pull that only gets stronger the longer it runs, how much margin should a canal really leave for a ship this size?