On March 5th, the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) succeeded in its efforts to refloat the grounded container ship MSC Istanbul and the vessel has resumed its journey.
MSC Istanbul, was stuck in the canal on March 5th, during its northbound transit, heading to Portugal from Malaysia. Immediately after the central navigation control station had received the notification that the vessel had run aground at km 78 (Canal marking), four tugboats were deployed at once to refloat the vessel.
The four tugs were Port Said, of a bollard pull capacity of 95 tons, in addition to Mosaed 1, Mosaed 2, and Mosaed 5. Besides these tugboats, Baraka 1, one of the SCA’s largest tugboats, joined the operation.
The crisis management team, that comprises of members from the Transit Dept. including pilots, traffic control officers, navigation control representatives as well as the crews of the tugboats. The forces managed to deal with the incident without impacting the traffic through the Canal in any negative way.