UN begins syphoning oil from decaying ship off Yemen to “avoid catastrophe”
The United Nations has declared the beginning of an effort to ‘prevent catastrophe’ by extracting oil from a decaying tanker that is anchored off the coast of Yemen. More than 1.1 million barrels of oil that had been stored in the corroding tanker were being transferred to another vessel that the United Nations Organisation had purchased.
CAIRO: A sophisticated salvage effort to avert a potential environmental catastrophe started on Tuesday with an international crew syphoning oil out of a dilapidated oil tanker off the coast of Yemen, according to the head of the UN.
Numerous organisations have been warning about the neglected SOF Safer vessel for years, claiming it may explode or produce a significant oil leak.
“The ship-to-ship transfer of oil, which has started today, is the critical next step in avoiding an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe on a colossal scale,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement.
He added that the UN was transferring more than 1.1 million barrels of oil from the corroding tanker to another ship.
According to the UN, the oil transfer will be finished in less than three weeks following months of on-site preparation.
To store up to 3 million barrels of export oil pumped from fields in Marib, a governorate in eastern Yemen, the Safter tanker was constructed in the 1970s and sold to the Yemeni government in the 1980s. The ship has 34 storage tanks and is 360 metres (1,181 ft) long.
It is anchored 6 kilometres (3.7 miles) from the Red Sea ports of Hodeida and Ras Issa in Yemen, a key region that is under the control of the Houthi rebels, who are at war with the internationally recognised government and supported by Iran.
The vessel’s structural integrity has been damaged for eight years due to lack of maintenance, putting it at risk of exploding or shattering into pieces. According to internal records from June 2020, seawater has entered the engine compartment, damaging the pipes and raising the possibility of sinking.
The UN, other nations, and environmental organisations have long warned that an oil spill or explosion could disrupt international commercial shipping through the crucial Bab el-Mandeb and Suez Canal routes, doing incalculable harm to the world economy.
According to the UN, the tanker contains four times as much oil as was spilt in the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident off the coast of Alaska, one of the biggest ecological disasters in history.
According to Guterres, the cost of cleanup alone “could easily run into the tens of billions of dollars.”
The salvage team was able to securely berth the replacement vessel, now known as the Yemen, next to the Safer on Saturday after it arrived at the Yemeni shore earlier this month.
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