One of the side effects of the ongoing Red Sea shipping crisis has been the suspension of the dismantling of the FSO Safer, a 48-year-old, decaying tanker that the United Nations has been attempting to move.
Splash has repeatedly reported on the UN’s operation to remove the FSO Safer from Yemeni waters. Last year, the UN bought a Euronav tanker and was able to empty the rusting, abandoned FSO Safer’s cargo of 1.14m barrels of crude oil.
However, since then the security situation in the region has deteriorated dramatically with the Houthis in Yemen coming out in support of Hamas in Gaza and targeting nearly 40 merchant ships over the past three months.
French newswire AFP is now reporting that thanks to the insecure environment around Yemen, combined with a fundraising shortfall, the operation to tow the ship to a place to be scrapped has had to be put on hold. According to the reports published in splash247.com .
Carrying over 1.1m barrels of oil, the FSO Safer was abandoned off Yemen’s Red Sea port of Hudaydah after the civil war broke out in the country in 2015. Since then, the vessel deteriorated significantly in the absence of any servicing or maintenance, prompting fears of a major environmental disaster that would have been four times the scale of the Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska in 1989.
