Captain of the Ever Given runs a very tight ship

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/03/2021 (1369 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Before the pandemic, I hadn’t realized that daily life was composed of such tiny but essential elements. I write of the container ship Ever Given which recently got diagonally stuck in the Suez Canal and blocked the transit of nearly everything bought and sold on the planet.

I’m not exaggerating; I check the English journalist Rose George’s book on the international shipping industry, “Ninety Percent of Everything: The Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate,” and am now fretting about the fate of a grey polypropylene Novogratz rug that was going to make our deck quite the thing this season.

I imagine the floppy plastic product is lolling below deck on this great bulbous tottering 400-metres-long tin can — one of the world’s biggest ships, it’s too fat for the Panama Canal — trying to do a three-point-turn in a sandy conduit 300 metres wide at its narrowest point. I tried this on my driver’s test and you know, you can always take the test again (I did) but you only have one shot at unblocking more than 200 ships while billions of innocents like me hanker for party accoutrements as their vaccines kick in.

I yearn to see the captain. Does he resemble the overgroomed Francesco Schettino, the captain who steered the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia onto the rocks off Tuscany in 2012 and then hastily hopped off the ship? Are they the same man?

I hope the captain isn’t as blasé about my summer furnishings as the preening Schettino — I suspect it was the weight of his hair product that originally tilted the ship — was about his 4,200 passengers and crew.

Mainlandsplainers are offering advice on how to turn around the Ever Given and its 20,000 stacked containers: tugboats fore and aft; pivoting rather than pulling; a fabulous ramming; or even dredging followed by jiggling.

Have they considered turning it off and turning it back on again? I personally would dig it out at each end as a start to widening the canal, as they should have done in 1859. As we have learned from pandemic preparedness, you pay a price for doing things on the cheap. Funny how the bill came due in 2020, a good start to our toughest century so far.

I greatly admire George, whose previous book “The Big Necessity” was about the international going-to-the-bathroom industry. She wrote another fine book, “Nine Pints,” about blood and medication. I wonder what this prescient writer is working on now. Whatever it is, it will be the next big calamity.

She is deadpan about facts, which makes her catastrophizing more eerie. No one thought about the exploited Asian crews of cut-rate cruise ships until Norovirus and now this, nor the mechanics of breathing until we studied the concept of pandemic proximity.

No one mentioned Suez unless they were crafting a late-night history paper on the pre-Boris humiliations of the British Empire. Admit it, some people thought those Somali pirates were amusing. Not so funny now, is it, as the ships head for the Cape of Good Hope past a perilous coastline?

I know what you’re thinking: what comes next? Don’t say nuclear — we wobble between thinking power plants are insecure as we build even more to fight global warming. Which great power is imploding most badly, China, the U.S., or Russia? But you know, it’s always the quiet ones who shoot up the school. Is it Indonesia’s time to shine?

There’s a catastrophe coming that we will deal with, perhaps by losing many millions of people — let’s be candid, the math of population is in humanity’s favour — that hasn’t crossed our collective radar. Is it something we eat like E. coli or touch like Putin’s Novichok? Will it be watery and sideways like a tsunami or porridgey and subterranean like an earthquake?

Will it be something we ourselves built?

I’m thinking asteroid, as there is nothing we can do to prepare, nothing. No, digging around its rocky dimensions or bouncing its bigness could not possibly help, we’re long past that now.

My advice? Be plucky in the aftermath, and good luck to the survivors, both of you.

Heather Mallick is a Toronto-based columnist covering current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick