WASHINGTON — A years-in-the-making operation to drain oil from an aging supertanker moored off Yemen’s western coast shows what can be achieved through de-escalation among the country's warring parties, the US special envoy for Yemen told Al-Monitor in an interview.
The FSO Safer, a 47-year-old vessel stranded near the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, has long been considered an environmental time bomb that could unleash havoc on a country already considered the poorest in the Arab world.
The Safer is under the control of the Houthis, an Iran-aligned rebel group that relied on the vessel as a military deterrent in its conflict with the Saudi-backed internationally recognized government in Yemen. The Houthis haven’t performed maintenance on the rusting Safer since seizing it from the state-run oil company in 2015, and for years they stonewalled UN efforts to send inspectors onboard. The fast-decaying ship is now considered beyond repair.
With seawater leaking into the vessel’s engine room and damaging its pipes, experts said it was no longer a matter of if, but when, the Safer leaked more than 1 million barrels of light crude oil into the sea — four times the amount spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989. Experts warned the slick could reach the coastlines of Djibouti, Eritrea and Saudi Arabia, contaminate drinking water supplies for the entire region, wipe out its fisheries and disrupt one of the world’s busiest commercial shipping routes.
