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"...FSO Safer carries more than 1.1 million barrels of crude oil..."
On Sunday, UN officials stated that a UN replacement ship arrived in Yemen's Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, in preparation to transfer crude oil from a tanker abandoned off the coast of the war-torn country since 2015.
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According to UN official statements, in the upcoming two-week first phase of the emergency rescue operation, the replacement vessel Nautica will transfer all crude from the floating supertanker Safer, before a catenary anchor leg mooring buoy will be secured to the seabed to fix the replacement ship in the second phase.
Official records show that, the Yemen-owned FSO Safer, which carries more than 1.1 million barrels of crude oil, was used as a terminal floating storage to export oil, and it has not undergone maintenance since 2015 due to the current the civil conflict.
The United Nations has described it as a "floating time bomb," stating that it poses a significant risk of explosion or an oil spill, which will potentially cause a disaster four times as serious as the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in the Red Sea.
According to a UN Development Programme report in April, said possible explosion or spill would result in the killing of all fish off Yemen's Red Sea coast within hours, with fish stocks taking 25 years to recover.
As the ship #Nautica arrived off war-torn #Yemen to pump more than a million barrels of oil from the decaying #FSOSafer tanker, @UN officials warned on Sunday that the risk of a spill or an explosion is still "very high" https://t.co/lDfB2q24IY pic.twitter.com/qBvpqREBf6
— Arab News (@arabnews) July 17, 2023
Moreover, it would also lead to the closure of the essential ports of Hodeidah and Saleef, which are crucial for bringing food, fuel, and life-saving supplies into Yemen, where, according to official data, 17 million people need food assistance.
Last week, the United Nations said it had raised about 118 million U.S. dollars out of the estimated 148-million-dollar budget for the emergency rescue project for Safer.
According to official data, Hodeidah port city has been under Houthi control since the eruption of the civil war in late 2014, when the Houthi group seized control over much of the country's north and forced the internationally recognized government out of the capital Sanaa.
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