Suez: The Seas Rejoined

At Suez city, the Red Sea terminus of the great waterway, workers swarmed over docks and piers that had been empty for years. Buoys were being assembled, and pilot ships recaulked and overhauled. In the freshly painted warehouses, piles of new, sweet-smelling hemp rope rose like giant becalmed cobras in spirals to the ceilings. Canal pilots, the skilled men who guide ships through the narrow canal, were flocking back from all over the world. The Suez Canal, once the vital link between the West and the East, was being prepared for this week's gala reopening, eight years to the day after its closing.

Since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the 101-mile-long canal has been little more than a fortified ditch. The Israeli pullback into the Sinai in the aftermath of the October 1973 war still leaves it open to easy attack. But with both banks now under Egyptian control. President Anwar Sadat gambled that he could open it again. To underscore his seriousness, Sadat also approved a $10 billion five-year plan to rebuild the ruined cities along the canal's banks and construct new airports, rail lines and communications facilities in the area.

The task of readying the canal kept an international team busy for more than a year removing the detritus of two full-scale wars and a war of attrition. As the first step, U.S. Navy Sea Stallion helicopters towed minesweeping sleds the entire length of the waterway, searching for magnetic sea mines. The Israelis refused to say whether or not they had planted any, but none were found. Next, teams from the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, France and Egypt cleared out land mines, bombs, antitank mines, cluster bombs and anything else that might have accidentally fallen into the water.

Altogether, divers and dredgers retrieved 8,524 pieces of unexploded ordnance, 127 pontoon-bridge sections, 16 trucks, eight tanks, 104 small boats and barges, ten large sunken wrecks and 15 airplanes, not to mention oil drums, anchors, beer cans and one old toilet. Some 686,000 mines and other explosives were removed from both banks. In addition, the causeway built by the Israelis to supply their bridgehead on the west bank during the 1973 war had to be pulled away. The Egyptians spent a total of $288 million on the clearing effort, the Americans another $20 million.

The money may prove to be well spent. A 19th century biographer of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat who completed the canal in 1869, said that the waterway "traced for civilization a pacific and productive route across the sands of the desert." It also saved mercantile countries huge sums in shipping charges. Closing the canal has cost an estimated $10 billion in the extra expense of sending goods around Africa's southern tip. By the end of this week, when the first convoy starts north from Suez city, ships traveling from the Persian Gulf will be able to cut their travel time to Marseille by 50%, to the U.S. East Coast ports by 28%. Japan and Northern Europe in effect will be 22% closer by sea than they were last week.

With all the hoopla of the reopening, however, there are some who feel that the canal will never again attain the importance it had before 1967. Even before the closing, tanker-fleet owners had begun building giant superships of 100,000 tons or more that could not navigate the canal. In 1967, fully 74% of the world's tanker fleet could traverse the canal; today only 27% of the tanker fleet can use it. Thus, though Cairo last week almost doubled the tolls from what they were in 1967, Egyptian hopes of collecting $450 million a year from the canal may prove optimistic.

The Egyptians are well aware of the new realities of the shipping business, and are already planning to deepen and widen the canal to take bigger ships. Within three years they hope to accommodate ships of 53-ft. draft and 150,000 tons fully loaded (v. the present maximums of 38 ft. and 60,000 tons); within six years they want to be able to take ships of 67-ft. draft and 260,000 tons.

Even so, some experts consider Egypt's grandiose plans for expanding the Suez Canal to be way beyond the country's means. Before Lesseps first brought together the waters of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, 97 million cu. yds. of earth had to be excavated; the new plans would require the removal of 300 million cu. yds., a stupendous undertaking even with today's more advanced earth-moving equipment. The Egyptians are nonetheless confident. There is even some talk that the colossal bronze statue of Lesseps, torn to pieces and dumped in a Port Said shipyard at the time of the 1956 British-French-Israeli seizure of Suez, may be cemented together again and placed on a pedestal.

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