The rescue operation of an oil tanker in Yemen to avoid an oil slick in the Red Sea can now begin after the arrival, this Tuesday (30), of a team in charge of protecting this ship abandoned for years, announced the UN.
The mission is to transfer the equivalent of more than a million barrels from the vessel FSO Safer to the supertanker Nautica, recently acquired by the UN, and start the operation in “perhaps ten days, two weeks”, said the coordinator for Yemen, David Gressly, by videoconference.
In March, the UN announced that it had acquired a huge tanker to rescue the ship anchored in front of the port of Hodeida (western Yemen), to avoid an oil spill and eliminate the risk of explosion and fire.
The operation will be carried out by the specialized company SMIT Salvage, a subsidiary of the Dutch company Boskalis, and its total cost is estimated at 148 million dollars (R$ 749 million, at current prices).
“Today is a very special day as many of you have followed the FSO Safer saga and will understand that […] we have really reached a decisive stage”, commented Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), responsible for this case.
“If everything goes as planned, by the end of June/beginning of July we should be able to say that the crucial phase of the transfer from boat to boat has been completed,” he added.
Built in 1976, the FSO Safer served as a floating storage and offloading terminal until 2015 and was abandoned when Yemen sank into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises due to civil war.
According to the UN, the Safer contains four times the amount of oil in the Exxon Valdez, the oil tanker that caused one of the biggest environmental disasters in US history in 1989.
The UN added that cleaning up an oil spill of this size would cost 20 billion dollars (R$ 101 billion), in addition to the devastating environmental, economic and humanitarian consequences.
In total, the rescue operation will cost more than US$140 million (R$708 million), of which US$14 million (R$70.8 million) is still missing to finance the first phase and US$29 million (R$146 million ) to carry out the operation in full, indicated the UN.
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