The answer is transparency, now what was the question?
As we all know by now, the world’s media attention can shift very quickly when bad news strikes. And the grounding of Ever Given wasn’t even particularly bad news; there was no pollution, no fatalities and no sinister causes that we know of.
We should know a lot more when the accident report comes out, because despite the IMO bemoaning the frequent lack of reports following maritime accidents, this one is too big to ignore.
The media attention was a welcome diversion from COVID and it was illustrative of the positive story that should follow the wider roll-out of vaccines: consumers in the west at least, have their credit cards out and are ready for some kind of normality.
While we can’t expect the media attention to last, what it does remind us of is the importance of the chokepoints that are critical to the orderly functioning of global supply chains.
With the definite causes of the grounding unknown, we can already conclude that the implications should be safer navigation and the need for much greater level of information and access to what happens onboard ships.
There are several drivers to this, not least security. The world may have spent the last 12 months in a Pandemic-induced stasis but we would be wrong to think that the short and long term threats to stability have gone away.