A cargo ship that was stuck in the Chesapeake Bay for more than a month has finally been freed, Coast Guard officials confirmed Sunday.
On March 13, the 1,095-foot Ever Forward ran aground in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. The ship, owned by the Taiwanese company Evergreen Marine Corp., was en route from the port of Baltimore to Norfolk, Virginia, when it ran aground just north of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Authorities have said there were no reports of injuries, damage or contamination.
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After two failed attempts, on April 4, the Coast Guard decided to offload 500 of the ship’s nearly 4,900 containers in an effort to get it refloated. The Coast Guard, the Maryland Department of the Environment and the Evergreen Marine Corporation worked together for the operation.
After the containers were removed, a full moon and high tide helped lift the salvage boats as they pulled and pushed the massive ship out of the mud, through a dredged hole and back into the shipping channel.
“If you’ve ever been in a swamp, and you’ve stepped on the swamp with your boot, and then you try to get it out and your foot comes out, but the boot doesn’t. Pretty much the same thing on a larger scale here,” the captain said of the Coast Guard, David O’Connell.
The Coast Guard has said it has not determined what caused the Ever Forward to run aground.
The ship was outside the shipping channel and has not been blocking shipping, unlike last year’s high-profile grounding in the Suez Canal of its sister ship, the Ever Given, which disrupted the global supply chain for days. .
Contributed: The Associated Press
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