Ailing Yemen tanker may cause bigger environmental disaster than Exxon Valdez

TIME is running out to prevent an “environmental disaster waiting to happen” in the Red Sea, the UK and the UN warned this week, as a dispute over a decaying oil tanker off Yemen’s coast risks spilling a million barrels of crude into a fragile marine ecosystem.

Amid the horrors of Yemen’s civil war – which has brought the country to the brink of famine and produced what the UN describes as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster – warnings of impending doom are legion.

But as the Security Council heard this week, this one sounded particularly dire. The tanker in question, the

FSO Safer, is a 44-year-old vessel bought by Yemen’s government in the Eighties and moored offshore 30 miles northwest of Hodeidah.

A skeleton crew remains on board the rusting ship but fuel to run the boilers ran out long ago, meaning inert gas has not been injected into the Safer’s storage tanks for years.

Volatile fumes have likely accumulated, prompting one report to describe the vessel as a “massive floating bomb”.

In May, seawater flooded the engine room. Divers carried out temporary repairs but a critical cooling system was damaged. Urgency is needed, the Foreign Office says, because a spill from the vessel – into one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes – could be up to four times larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Prince William Sound, Alaska.

The clean up could cost £16billion, it estimated. “The FSO Safer oil tanker is an environmental disaster waiting to happen,” James Cleverly, the minister for the Middle East said.

Until the war started, the floating storage and offloading vessel was the primary conduit for Yemen’s oil exports.

When Houthi rebels seized the capital Sana’a and the port city of Hodeidah in 2014, the Safer came under their control and regular maintenance of the single-hulled vessel stopped.