AFTER not being maintained for eight years, international organizations have warned that a dilapidated tanker stranded off the coast of Yemen is at risk of exploding and triggering one of the largest oil spills recorded in history.
Built by a Japanese company in the 1970s, the FSO Safer was sold to the Yemeni government in the 1980s to store up to 3 million barrels of export oil pumped from fields in eastern Yemen.
The supertanker has been moored on Yemen’s west coast for more than 30 years but maintenance operations for the vessel have been suspended since 2015 due to the ongoing civil war in the Arab sovereign state.
FSO Safer’s structural integrity has been compromised and is at risk of breaking apart or exploding after not being maintained for the past eight years. The cost of cleanup alone is estimated at $20 billion.
The stranded vessel carries more than 1.1 million barrels of oil or four times the amount of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez supertanker off Alaska in 1989, one of the world’s worst ecological disasters.
The potential damage is enough to make it the fifth largest oil spill from a tanker in history once it explodes.
According to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, a major spill would destroy marine life; expose millions of people to highly polluted air; devastate fishing communities; force nearby ports to close; and disrupt global commercial shipping through the Suez Canal.
The complex operation to salvage the rusting tanker could be completed in less than three weeks, according to the United Nations.
