The story of the Safer, a decomposing 'environmental bomb' that the UN is trying to deactivate before the catastrophe

Yemen is a country torn apart by war since 2015. Insecurity, hunger and fear are the constants in the lives of Yemenis. NGOs consider theirs the worst humanitarian crisis in history. The war between government forces (backed by Saudi Arabia) and Houthi rebels (armed by Iran) has caused 4.5 million internally displaced people and more than two-thirds of the population is living below the poverty line.

We are talking about a country with thousands of civilian deaths and many diseases: the largest cholera outbreak of our century has occurred in Yemen. And poverty: more than 7.4 million people need nutritional assistance and 2.3 million children under five suffer from acute malnutrition, according to the World Health Organization.. At least the war has been on pause since the truce reached by the UN in April 2022.

The consequences could be catastrophic on an environmental, humanitarian and economic level.”

Can things get worse? It is always possible. The country only lacks an ecological catastrophe and it is brewing on the Yemeni coast of the Red Sea. The FSO Safer, an oil tanker in an advanced state of decomposition that could spill more than a million barrels of oil, is still moored there.. “The consequences could be catastrophic in the environmental, humanitarian and economic sphere,” says the United Nations.

The Safer is an oil storage and transfer vessel 362 meters long (length) and 70 meters wide (beam). It was built in 1976 in Japan as the oil tanker Esso Japan, with 406,640 deadweight tons.. It is capable of storing up to three million barrels of crude.

The ship has been moored off the coast of Yemen since 1988, but if it is a problem today, a huge problem, it is because of the civil war that is raging in the country.. In March 2015, during the first days of the conflict, the Safer was captured by Houthi forces when they seized control of the coastline near its Red Sea mooring point north of the city of Al Hudaydah.

The magnitude of the catastrophe

The Safer contains 1.14 million barrels of crude; four times the amount of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez. That ship, which ran aground in Alaska on March 24, 1989 with millions of liters of crude oil in its holds, ended up spilling 37,000 tons into the sea.

According to the United Nations, a massive spill from the Safer would destroy virgin reefs, coastal mangroves and other marine life throughout the Red Sea.. Thus, it would expose millions of people to highly polluted air and cut off the supply of food, fuel and other vital products.

Fish stocks would take 25 years to recover and cleanup would cost more than €18 billion

Fish stocks would take 25 years to recover. Coastal communities would be hardest hit: hundreds of thousands of jobs in the fishing industry would be lost almost overnight. The cost of cleaning up this hypothetical catastrophe is estimated at more than 18,000 million euros.

That is if the FSO Safer does not explode before. the risk is real. Since the turbine that normally injects inert gases into the storage tanks is not in operation, nothing prevents the increasing presence of explosive gases due to fuel evaporation.

rescue operation

On May 30, the operation coordinated by the United Nations began to prevent the spill. A group of experts from a salvage company traveled to this point in the Red Sea to prepare the Safer for the transfer of its oil. The works have already begun and should continue for 19 days, the time that is estimated to take to pump its more than one million barrels of crude oil to another ship.

In the absence of anyone more willing or able, the UN has stepped up and assumed the risk of carrying out this very delicate operation.”

“In the absence of someone else willing or able to perform the task, the United Nations has stepped up and assumed the risk of carrying out this most delicate operation.. The ship-to-ship transfer of oil that has begun is the next critical step to avoid an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe of colossal scale,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres.

The risk of breaking the hull

According to the United Nations, generous donors, private companies and citizens have contributed some 110 million euros to the plan to prevent the spill. With that money, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) bought the ship Nautica in March to transfer the crude.

At the moment, no agreement has been reached for the sale of oil.”

But another 20 million is still needed to end the extraction works (a donation can be made here). In total about 130 million, which is actually very little if we remember that the cost of cleaning would be more than 18,000 million euros.

Then it will be necessary to see who gets the oil, if the Government of Yemen or the Houthi rebels. “At the moment, no agreement has been reached for the sale of oil,” says Achim Steiner, director of UNDP.

However, even if the “rescue” ends successfully, the Safer will continue to be a “threat to the environment”, according to the UN. The problem is that it contains viscous hydrocarbon residue that threatens to break your hull.