Global Courant
The supertanker, holding more than a million barrels of oil, has been deteriorating since 2015, leading to fears of a catastrophic spill.
The United Nations has begun pumping up oil from a decaying ship docked off Yemen’s Red Sea coast to avert a potential spill and environmental disaster, UN officials said.
The FSO Safer — a floating storage and offloading tanker (FSO) holding more than 1.14 million barrels of oil — has been at risk of breaking apart or exploding due to corrosion and lack of maintenance for years since a coalition led by Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen’s war in 2015.
The Yemeni Houthi rebels, who control the area of the Yemeni coast where the Safer is docked, had previously prevented a salvage operation from taking place, but finally agreed in March to allow the oil to be unloaded.
The Safer’s overseas oil will now be transferred to a replacement ship, named Yemen, in a ship-to-ship transfer expected to take 19 days. said the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) – the humanitarian agency responsible for conducting the operation.
“In the absence of anyone else willing or able to carry out this task, the United Nations has taken on the risk of carrying out this very delicate operation,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday.
“The ship-to-ship transfer of oil begun today is the critical next step in preventing an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe on a colossal scale,” he added.
The operation, the first of its kind, is risky, but the potential leakage of the remaining oil into the deteriorating tanker the Yemeni government bought in the 1980s is even riskier.
Observers have worried for years that the Safer could burst or explode. The resulting oil spill could wipe out one of the world’s largest marine ecosystems.
Once the oil is offloaded, delivery and installation of a Catenary Anchor Leg Mooring (CALM) buoy will take place, the UN said.
The buoy will then be secured to the seabed, which will in turn be used to secure the replacement ship, a process to be completed by September, the international body said.
A technical support vessel from Dutch-based company Boskalis/SMITis would be ready to intervene if oil spills occurred during the operation.
The 47-year-old supertanker was abandoned and has been out of service since the outbreak of civil war in Yemen eight years ago.
The Safer is anchored near the Ras Isa oil terminal controlled by the Yemeni Houthi movement, which seized large parts of the country in 2015.
Mohammed Mudawi of UNDP Yemen told Al Jazeera in mid-July that the ship had not been properly maintained because it was in an area riddled with mines. The UN agency team had also been working to prevent the build-up of flammable gases.
“We are very concerned that it may explode because of the gases,” Mudawi said.
According to the UN, a major spill would destroy coral, mangroves and other marine life; exposing millions of people to highly polluted air; destroy fishing communities; forcing nearby ports to close; and disrupt shipping through the Suez Canal. The cleaning costs alone are estimated at $20 billion.
A spill from the Safer could potentially have a bigger impact than one of the largest oil spills in history, the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, as the Safer carries four times as much oil, according to the UN.
