Water Reaches Engine Room Of Loaded Abandoned Tanker In Red Sea; UN Tries Crowdfunding Salvage
The FSO Safer tanker has been rusting away off Yemen’s coast since 2015. Sitting in the delicate ecosystem of the Red Sea, famous for its corals and fish, it threatens to release roughly four times the amount of crude oil spilled off Alaska in the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989. Seawater has already seeped into the engine room, according to U.N. officials who are sounding the alarm that a tank rupture or explosion would wreak havoc on marine life, vital shipping lanes and regional economies.
For years, the United Nations has sought to launch a rescue mission to transfer the oil and move the ship to a safer location for inspections or dismantling. But the vessel is anchored in waters northwest of Yemen’s port city of Hodeida near territory held by the Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels. The war between them and the now-Saudi-backed government had put an end to maintenance and prevented any offloading.
The opposing sides have finally agreed to a plan to prevent a disaster, the United Nations said, but now it doesn’t have the money to implement it. “The tanker is beyond repair, and the fear is that it could soon break apart or explode,” the global body said this week as it launched the online crowdfunding campaign. The U.N. announcement said it collected about three-quarters of the money necessary to transfer the oil to another ship, after Saudi Arabia and the United States recently promised $10 million each, following pledges from the Netherlands, France, Qatar and others that brought the total in U.N. hands to $60 million. To help pay the remaining $20 million, the United Nations’ Yemen coordinator, David Gressly, is appealing online to people everywhere to raise $5 million by the end of the month so that work can start in July.
At a briefing on Monday, Gressly appeared to acknowledge that the call for $5 million from the public was unusual, describing it as “an ambitious goal,” but maintained that a disaster was looming. The increase of currents and winds in the winter will heighten the risk of the vessel breaking up and spilling the oil into the Red Sea. “Every day that goes by is another day that we take a risk, a chance that this vessel will break up and the catastrophe that I described will unfold,” he said. The entire plan, involving first unloading the oil and later replacing the 1,230-foot vessel — one of the world’s largest tankers — would cost $144 million, according to U.N. estimates.
EDIT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/17/yemen-tanker-spill-red-sea-crowdfunding/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social