UN Successfully Removes Oil from Deteriorating Tanker off Yemen

In order to prevent a potential environmental catastrophe, the UN said on Friday that it has finished removing more than 1 million barrels of oil from a decomposing supertanker off the Red Sea coast of Yemen.

Since the decaying Safer tanker had the potential to rupture or explode and dump four times as much oil as the 1989 Exxon Valdez catastrophe off the coast of Alaska, U.N. officials and campaigners have been warning that the entire Red Sea shoreline was in danger.

The Safer’s maintenance work was put on hold in 2015 due to the conflict in Yemen. The ship, which is docked off Yemen and is used for storage, has been there for more than 30 years.

“It is a major moment of having averted a potentially catastrophic disaster,” said Achim Steiner, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, which oversaw the intricate operations to drain the oil from the ship.

For 18 days, salvage teams worked to remove the oil from the ship in sweltering summer conditions in a sea mine-filled war zone off the coast.

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UN Raises $120 Million for Yemeni Oil Cleanup Operation

According to Steiner, the United Nations raised more than $120 million for the operation, which also required the hiring of more than a dozen insurance companies, the purchase of a second tanker for the crude that was being offloaded, and aircraft equipped to release chemicals to spread the oil in the event of a spill.

There is no agreement on how such a transaction will go about, so U.N. representatives in Yemen will soon start talks with the nation’s warring parties in an effort to come to an understanding on how to divide the proceeds of a sale of the oil, which is primarily owned by the Yemeni state company SEPOC.

In a social media post, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres claimed that an environmental & humanitarian disaster had been avoided and pleaded with funders to support the project’s completion.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised Yemeni and United Nations officials for working together to prevent an economic, humanitarian, and environmental catastrophe, calling the effort a role model for international disaster prevention.

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Source: Reuters