Potential oil spill disaster looms off Yemen's coast, but who’s to blame?
Calls are rising to separate the politics of the military conflict in Yemen from the issue of an abandoned oil tanker in the Red Sea, in light of a looming ecological disaster that could affect the entire region.
SANAA, Yemen — Both sides in Yemen's civil war are blaming each other for blocking international aid to prevent an imminent disaster in the Red Sea that has been described as a "floating bomb."
The Houthi-run Ministry of Water and Environment in Yemen held a press conference Dec. 14 in Sanaa to appeal for help, accusing the Saudi-led coalition it is battling of preventing the maintenance and unloading of the Safer, a floating storage and offloading oil ship.
Built as a Japanese single-hulled oil tanker in 1976, the Safer has been moored 7 kilometers (4 miles) off the Yemeni port of Ras Isa in Hodeidah. It has not been maintained since 2015, when the Yemeni war broke out between the Iran-affiliated Houthis and the internationally recognized government backed by the Saudi coalition.
The Safer, owned by the Yemen Petroleum Company, has 34 crude oil tanks of different sizes and volumes, amounting to a total capacity of around 3 million barrels. Essentially a small-scale oil export terminal, the ship is estimated to contain about 1.1 million barrels of oil.
