“The operation aims to withdraw more than one million barrels of oil from the giant tanker Safer,” the United Nations Development Program said in a statement.
The United Nations revealed that the process of unloading oil from the Safer tanker will take about 19 days.
It is noteworthy that this process began to be prepared for years and aims to prevent a massive oil spill in the Red Sea.
And the director of the United Nations Development Program, Achim Steiner, had said earlier that “more than 1.1 million barrels of oil stored in Safer will be transferred to another ship purchased by the United Nations as an alternative to the rusty storage tanker.”
The replacement oil tanker “Yemen”, previously named “Nautica”, arrived alongside the “Safer” to begin the UN-coordinated operation.
What do you know about “Safer”?
- The rusty tanker is a Japanese-made ship built in the 1970s and sold to the Yemeni government in the 1980s, to store up to 3 million barrels of export oil that is pumped from the fields in the Marib governorate in eastern Yemen.
- The ship is 360 meters (1,181 feet) long and contains 34 storage tanks.
- The tanker is anchored 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) from Yemen’s western Red Sea ports of Hodeidah and Ras Issa, a strategic area.
- The ship has not been maintained for 8 years and its structural integrity is at risk of collapse or explosion.
- Seawater entered the tanker’s engine compartment, causing damage to pipes and increasing the risk of sinking, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press in June 2020.
It is worth noting that the “Safer” carries 4 times the amount of oil that was spilled in the “Exxon Valdez” disaster in 1989 off Alaska, which is one of the worst environmental disasters in the world, according to the United Nations.
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