A crew from Coast Guard Station Curtis Bay monitors the 1,095-foot Ever Forward, which ran aground in the Chesapeake Bay early this week. Photo by U.S. Coast Guard/Petty Officer 3rd Class Kimberly Reaves
March 17 — Almost one year after the Ever Given container ship became stuck in the Suez Canal, which led to a global disruption in trade, another Evergreen Marine Corp. cargo vessel has run aground — this time in Maryland.
The 2-year-old vessel, nearly 1,100 feet long, was headed to Norfolk, Va., after leaving the Port of Baltimore on Sunday. Called the Ever Forward, it didn’t get very far and ran aground in the Chesapeake Bay, port officials said.
Petty Officer 1st Class Steve Lehmann, a spokesman for the Coast Guard’s Mid-Atlantic district, told ABC News that an environmental team boarded the ship on Tuesday to determine how to remove it safely from a sandbar without harming the crew or polluting the water.
No injuries have been reported, according to Lehmann, and no pollution has been detected.
According to the Coast Guard Mid-Atlantic, the ship is outside the main shipping channel and is not a hazard to other ships.
While it still remains a mystery as to how the ship got stuck, the Ever Forward was outside the normal deep-water shipping channel. Some areas of the Chesapeake Bay are more than 150 feet deep.
The Ever Given container ship is seen after it was fully dislodged from the banks of the Suez Canal in Egypt on March 29, 2021. File Photo by Karem Ahmed/UPI
The weather, however, is not a likely suspect.
“Unlike inland lakes, the Chesapeake Bay doesn’t experience big changes in water level as a result of drought or runoff,” AccuWeather Senior Weather Editor Jesse Ferrell said.
The Coast Guard Mid-Atlantic, along with the Maryland Department of the Environment, is coordinating refloating efforts for the container ship, which is stuck in about 23 feet of water.
Lehmann said that the Coast Guard Mid-Atlantic team is “making sure all boxes are checked” before attempting to free the ship, and that there is currently no timeline in place for such an attempt.
The Chesapeake Bay region was forecast to encounter periods of rain and breezy conditions on Thursday before dry weather “briefly” returns to the area on Friday. More rain expected to return by Saturday.
The predicament comes about a year after the Ever Given ran aground in Egypt’s Suez Canal. It took crews there almost a week to free the vessel, which is one of the largest cargo ships in the world. The incident led to a settlement worth millions that Evergreen had to pay to the Egyptian government.
