The UN’s main coordinator for Yemen announced on Saturday that a ship is on its way to Yemen to pump oil from the deteriorating Safer tanker.
“Today at 9:45 a.m., the replacement ship Nautica departed #Djibouti for the Red Sea coast of Yemen in order to transport 1 million barrels of oil from the deteriorating #FSOSafer supertanker. The start of the oil transfer is next week, and I am eager to be aboard!, wrote David Gressly, the UN resident coordinator for Yemen, on Twitter.
After years of opposition to any attempt to rescue the ship, the Iran-backed Houthis eventually permitted international engineers to board and check the ailing Safer tanker, stranded off Hodeidah in western Yemen.
Since the start of the war in Yemen in 2015, the 47-year-old Safer has received little to no maintenance and has deteriorated to such an extent that experts worry it is in immediate risk of bursting into flames, exploding, or springing a leak.
If the ship’s cargo seeped into the ocean, both environmentalists and government authorities have issued dire warnings. Over the past three years, pictures of seawater pouring into the tanker’s chambers as rust eats away at the walls have attracted interest on a global scale.
According to the UN, 1.6 million Yemenis are among the approximately 30 million people who depend on the Red Sea ecosystems for their livelihood. Experts fear that a significant leak from the Safer may severely harm these ecosystems.
