A team of experts from the United Nations has begun emptying oil from a rusty sinking ship abandoned off the coast of Yemen in the Red Sea, potentially averting a possible spilling disaster.
The rescue work launched on Tuesday have come two years after the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (Igad), the regional bloc in the Horn of Africa, first raised alarm over the possible pollution from the ship.
Read: Igad issues alert over ageing tanker abandoned in the Red Sea
On Tuesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the mission will see one million barrels of oil from a decaying tanker transferred to a new vessel, labelling it a project to “to defuse what might be the world’s largest ticking time bomb.”
“The vessel could have exploded or broken apart, spilling as much as four times the oil released in the Exxon Valdez disaster,” he said, referring to the March 1989 oil disaster in Alaska, USA, which saw some 37,000 metric tons of oil spilled into sea, and costing billions of dollars in compensations, legal suits and clean-ups.
The vessel named FSO Safer is a 362-metre-long tanker used as a floating oil storage and offloading vessel. It was moored in the Red Sea north of the Yemeni city of al-Hudaydah, with some 1.14 million barrels of oil. It was owned by the Yemen Oil and Gas Corporation, according to the UN profile of the vessel. Its crew fled as soon as the civil war begun in the troubled country in 2015.
The UN said the operation would be complex, costing about $20 million to completely transfer the oil, clean the decaying vessel and turn it into scrap as well as removing environmentally damaging remains. But the team had to first go through delicate political negotiations with factions battling for control of the country. And the UN said the project has taken time because it was fundraising.
In 2020, Igad had said the vessel was a ticking environmental disaster.
Read: S.Sudan pledges to clean up oil spills after protests
The Igad Executive Secretary, Dr Workneh Gebeyehu said at the time that a “possible oil spill from the dilapidated tanker would occasion massive environmental catastrophe in the Red Sea which supports millions of livelihoods.”
Mr Guterres warned the operation was necessary to save fishing communities from losing livelihoods from a damaging oil spill, prevent deadly toxins from entering the waters and save the operations of local ports.
The Red Sea is one of the busiest shipping routes, often linking Europe, Asia and Africa.
“The United Nations enlisted the best in the business: a team of world leading experts in maritime law, oil spills, salvage operations, marine engineers, naval architects, insurance brokers and underwriters, chemists, surveyors and more.”
The UN says many countries and entities have donated to the project but called for more to ensure a complete overhaul and safe storage of the oil.
Source: The East African
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