As I was writing this, the Taiwanese Ever Given, a 200,000-tonne cargo ship that spans 400 metres, roughly the length of four football fields, was finally being first partially refloated and then freed.
The enormous mammoth got stuck in the Suez Canal and was blocking traffic. As of Monday, over 350 ships were waiting to transit the canal, which connects the Mediterranean and the Red Seas and is one of the main transportation arteries and the shortest maritime routes between Europe and lands lying around the Indian and western Pacific oceans.
The traffic there is heavy, and the volumes of goods going through this relatively narrow man-made waterway are hard to visualize. The Suez Canal accounts for over 15 per cent of the world shipping traffic, as it's the fastest seaborne route between Europe and Asia.
In one of the news articles, I read that traffic on the canal is worth $10 billion a day on average. For almost a week the canal was paralyzed, and the world was waiting and watching how they were trying to fix this multi-billion-dollar mishap. Some ships were sent to go around Africa, taking a long and not-so-safe route, but that was just a temporary and pretty risky alternative to the Suez Canal. But many of them were simply stuck.
As I was looking through fascinating pictures of excavators, which look like toy terriers at the feet of an elephant, trying to free Ever Given, I was thinking about how this curious phenomenon resulted in a global transportation cataclysm.
I remember in high school, our history teacher was talking about the first Russian revolution of 1905-1907, when people were fighting against failing monarchy and demanding better conditions. Back then, the strike movement was one of the main and most actively used weapons, utilized by people in their fight for justice.
The teacher then told us, 12-13-year-old students, that if the protesters would push a bit harder with the railroad strikes, they could have gotten the results they wanted in a matter of several weeks in 1905, which probably would have changed Russian history.
(Who knows, maybe even the USSR wouldn't be a thing then, but in history, there are no givens).
At that time, manufacturers, industry workers and all kinds of proletarians were striking all across the country. Farmers, who were badly lacking land, were their main ally. The intelligence also was supporting the working class, so lawyers, engineers, doctors, teachers and many other specialists went on strikes all over the country in those two years.
The country was convulsing. But all I remembered from that class was that if the railroad strikes would have lasted a notch longer, it all would be over in a matter of days. It simply would happen because already then, the country and all its citizens, especially those in the two capitals – St. Petersburg and Moscow – were dependant on supplies delivered from other regions and countries. And the capitals, traditionally, were the places where all big decisions were made. So once the transportation would fully stop and remain there for a while, according to the teacher, the country would descend into chaos, which would result in an earlier agreement, which also could have been more satisfying than what the protesters got after two years of resistance.
I guess we saw a similar effect to a smaller scale in early 2020, when Canadian railroads were being blocked with barricades. As people were taking up their cause, the interruption to the supply chain very quickly started hurting many businesses across the country, which also immediately affects individual citizens.
The paralysis of the transportation system is a huge power. That was the lesson I learned back in school. And when I was reading about Ever Given, the Doomsday clock came to my mind.
Just a reminder, this past January world scientists decided to leave the hands of this symbolic clock at 100 seconds to midnight, which is as close to the civilization-ending apocalypse as they've ever been and the same time it was set at in 2020.
A year ago, the main concerns were sparking around a nuclear threat and climate change. In 2021, the COVID-19 virus that so far killed over 2.8 million people, according to Worldometer, also became one of the big factors in that decision. And just as at the very beginning of the pandemic, the realization of how much we depend on the supply chain – which came back to me as I was going through numbers for economic losses and information about potential disruptions in shipments – gave me goosebumps.
Every so often I think that we are trying to take it slow and smart when it comes to the nuclear threat and climate change, we are doing our best to overcome the pandemic, and we focus on some global things. But sometimes something as simple as a major transportation disruption may become a tipping point, a point of no return in the deeply interconnected world.
Fortunately, this time the super ship was freed before creating any extreme issues, leaving the captain to deal with explaining how this awkward situation happened, and probably many people are like me, thinking of how fragile our system actually is.
