A friend of mine suggested I write about an oil tanker named Safer (pronounced “Saffer”). I’ll get back to that in a moment. First, let’s take a minute to acknowledge the situation in Yemen — the location of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The war in Yemen — being led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with the full support of U.S. tax dollars — has killed an estimated 377,000 people through direct and indirect causes. That’s at least 163 times the amount of Ukrainians allegedly killed since the Russian invasion. So, in case you need some help with this, here’s a Yemeni flag you can post on your Facebook profile right now to feel virtuous:
Back to the oil tanker named Safer. As you’re about to find out, the people of Yemen are teetering very close to the brink of an incomprehensible escalation of their already nightmarish misery. I was gonna write about it but I found an article by Ed Caesar called “The Ship That Became a Bomb” (Oct. 4, 2021) that covers enough of the bases. Below is an excerpt, followed by a link to the full article for your perusal:
“Soon, a vast, decrepit oil tanker in the Red Sea will likely sink, catch fire, or explode. In 1987, the Safer was redesigned as a floating storage-and-off-loading facility, or F.S.O., becoming the terminus of a pipeline that began at the Marib oil fields and proceeded westward, across mountains and five miles of seafloor. The ship has been moored there ever since, and recently it has degraded to the verge of collapse. More than a million barrels of oil are currently stored in its tanks. The Exxon Valdez spilled about a quarter of that volume when it ran aground in Alaska, in 1989.
“The Safer’s problems are manifold and intertwined. It is forty-five years old — ancient for an oil tanker. Its age would not matter so much were it being maintained properly, but it is not. In 2014, members of one of Yemen’s powerful clans, the Houthis, launched a successful coup, presaging a brutal conflict that continues to this day.
“The Houthi leadership has obstructed efforts by foreign entities to inspect the ship or to siphon its oil. The risk of a disaster increases every day. Some observers also believe that the Houthis have laid mines in the waters around the Safer. Many coastal regions under Houthi control have been booby-trapped this way. If explosives indeed surround the ship, nobody knows their exact locations. According to sources in Ras Issa, the port closest to the ship, the Houthi officer responsible for laying mines in the area was killed.
“The Safer threatens not only the ecosystems of the Red Sea but also the lives of millions of people. A major spill would close a busy shipping lane. In the worst forecasts, a large volume of oil would reach the Bab el-Mandeb Strait — the pinch point between Djibouti, on the African mainland, and Yemen. Every year, enough cargo passes through the strait to account for some ten percent of the world’s trade. The insurer Allianz estimated that when the container ship Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal for nearly a week, this past March, the incident cost about a billion dollars a day. Ships rarely traverse oil-contaminated waters, especially when a cleanup is in progress, and their insurance can be imperiled if they do. A spill from the Safer could take months to clear, imposing a toll of tens of billions of dollars on the shipping business and the industries it services.
“In any scenario, Yemenis would suffer the most. The country, which has a population of thirty million, is already experiencing the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Tens of thousands of Yemenis live in famine conditions, and another five million face dire food insecurity. Twenty million people require the support of non-governmental organizations to access basic provisions, and four million are internally displaced.
“A fire or an explosion on the Safer could pollute the air for up to eight million Yemenis and would complicate the delivery of foreign aid to the western coast. A spill would be even more calamitous. Yemen’s Red Sea fishing industry has already been ravaged by the war. An oil slick would knock it out entirely. A big spill would also block the port of Hodeidah, which is some thirty miles southeast of the tanker. Two-thirds of Yemen’s food arrives through the port. In every projection presented to the U.K. government, Hodeidah remained closed for weeks; in the worst case, it did not reopen for six months. The United Nations, whose mission to Yemen is overstretched and underfunded, has no contingency plan to accommodate a shutdown of the Hodeidah port.”
Ask yourself: Why do you know who Zelenksy is but this is almost certainly the first time you’ve ever heard about a doomed oil tanker named Safer?