The UN announced it had finished removing more than a million barrels of oil from a rotting supertanker off Yemen’s Red Sea coast, averting a catastrophic environmental calamity.
For years, UN authorities and activists have warned that the entire Red Sea shoreline was at risk because the decaying Safer tanker could have ruptured or exploded, dumping four times the amount of oil spilled in the 1989 Exxon Valdez catastrophe off Alaska.
The war in Yemen forced the Safer’s repair operations to be halted in 2015. The ship is used for storage and has been parked off the coast of Yemen for almost 30 years.
According to the report, salvage personnel worked for 18 days in a coastal combat zone laced with sea mines, despite high summer temperatures and strong currents, to discharge the vessel’s oil.
In the meantime, there is no agreement on how such a deal will go about, and UN representatives in Yemen will shortly start talks with the nation’s warring parties in an effort to reach 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, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres claimed that “an environmental & humanitarian catastrophe” had been avoided and pleaded with funders to support the project’s completion.
US Secretary, of State Antony Blinken praised the United Nations and Yemeni parties who “came together to avert an environmental, economic, and humanitarian disaster,” saying the work was a model for cooperation on international disaster prevention.
