Adm. Ossama Rabiee, Chairman and Managing Director of the Suez Canal Authority, said today that traffic in the Canal is flowing normally in both directions, and that it hasn't been impacted by the navigational emergency that occurred this afternoon as maritime salvage efforts were successful in the immediate handling of the grounding incident of the oil tanker KOMANDER during its transit through the Suez Canal amongst vessels of the northern convoy.
H.E. clarified that immediately upon the Main Navigation Control Center receiving the notice of the failure of the tanker's machinery that lead to its grounding at km 47 (Canal Marking) at 12:30 pm, five SCA tugboats; MOHAMED BESHIR, MOSAED 4, PORT SAID 3, SUEZ 1 and NABIL ELHELALY, were deployed to the location to carry out the necessary towage, refloat the tanker once more and return it to its course, in addition to the tugboat EZZAT ADEL to assist with the towage works.
Adm. Rabiee highlighted that the tugboats deployment as well as the salvage works only took 30 minutes as the SCA tugboats have successfully handled the navigational emergency and were able to resolve it by 01:00 pm. Afterwards, the salvage tugboat EZZAT ADEL, of 160 ton bollard-pull capacity, started towing the tanker to the Bitter Lakes area, and traffic returned back to normal in both directions.
The tanker is 274 m. in length, has a beam of 48 m. and its tonnage is 80 thousand tons.
H.E. has sent a message of reassurance stressing the SCA's ability to immediately handle difficult situations and manage navigational emergencies efficiently and competently thanks to its human capital and technical capabilities, in addition to its advanced maritime fleet and accumulated experience in the fields of towage and salvage.
It is noteworthy that traffic through the Canal today has witnessed the transit of 34 vessels in both directions at a total net tonnage of 1.4 million tons.
