8 other times ships have run into problems in the Suez Canal

The massive cargo ship currently blocking the Suez Canal holding up of billions of dollars worth of shipping each day isn't the first time something has shut down the link between the Mediterranean and Red seas.

The 400-metre-long Japanese-owned MV Ever Given has been stuck in a single-lane stretch of the famed canal, one of the busiest shipping routes in the world, since Tuesday.And although every effort is being made to clear the way, more than 300 ships were still waiting to get through as the problem persisted on Saturday.

But the canal has seen this kind of trouble before in its long history, sometimes shutting down forhours, days, weeks or in one case eight years.

In 1937, the U.K.-boundship Viceroy of Indiaran aground, causing a holdup for its 700 passengers and the vessels behind it.

It shut down "all shipping" for a time, according to a report by The Associated Pressfrom Cairoon April 11, the day traffic returned to normal.

"She was refloated after part of the cargo was unloaded," the reportsaid.

A British freighter, the Lord Church, also ran aground in September 1953, "holding up six following ships,"The Associated Press reported, and a year latera 10,000-ton tanker called the World Peace struck a railway bridge, causing another traffic tie-up.

WATCH | Efforts to get Ever Given moving:

Efforts underway to free massive cargo ship stuck across Egypt's Suez Canal

4 years ago

Duration 0:31

Shipping traffic is halted for another day on one of the world's busiest trade routes, after the Ever Given ran aground on Tuesday.

The World Peace,owned by a Greek company headed by the brother-in-law of Aristotle Onassis,managed to block the canal "more effectively than Axis bombs did in World War II,"according to the New York Times.

More than 200 shipswere forced to anchor while the problem, which cleared after three days,was dealt with, Reuters reported.

One year later, Egypt sparked a brief war whenPresidentGamalAbdel Nasser nationalized the canal, which until then had been controlled by British and French interests.

Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt that fall. But the Suez Crisis, as it became known, lasted little more than a week quelled in November by a United Nations peacekeeping force that Lester Pearson, the future Canadian prime minister,helped muster and for whichhe later won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The crisis closed the canaluntil March 30, when, according to a report in the Toronto Star, "the first convoy to transit the Suez Canal in five months cleared through Port Said ... and passed into the Mediterranean to a deafening salvo of whistles and cheers."

Five months later, in August, a 9,000-ton tanker called the Barbaros ran aground, damaged its rudderand held up traffic for nearly a day, according to The Associated Press.

The stranded 'Yellow Fleet'

A decade later, at the outbreak of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war also known as the Six-DayWar Egypt closed the Suez Canal to international shipping traffic.More than a dozen cargo ships were stranded partway along the canal routefor eight years.

The ships stranded on Great Bitter Lake were "manned by skeleton crews, employed by insurance companies who paid off the owners long ago and hope one day to recover part of their losses," journalistArnold Bruner reported from the scene for CBC News in late 1973.

By that point, Bruner said, all that was left were the ships, which the crews called the "Yellow Fleet,"and cargo that could not be salvaged including some rotted cotton shown in the footage in his report.

"If peace does come to the Middle East and the Suez Canal is eventually opened, these ships may finally go home," Bruner said.

"When will that be? That's what the men of the rusting Bitter Lake fleet have been asking themselves for six and a half years, and the answer is as far away as ever."

The canal reopened onJune 5,1975, with a ceremony attended by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

The Toronto Star quoted Sadat the following day as saying he hoped the canal would again be "a channel of prosperity for the world."

The same report said a commercial convoy involving ships from Kuwait, Greece, the Soviet Union, China and Yugoslavia began transitingthe canal two hours after the ceremony.

Other, morerecent, delays have included another grounding in 2016 and a multi-ship collision in 2018,according to Bloomberg News.