AMSTERDAM (AP) – A Dutch salvage company has reached an agreement with the United Nations to pump oil from a rusting tanker off the coast of war-torn Yemen, in a move hailed as a “critical milestone.” in the measures to avoid a possible environmental disaster. its parent company announced Thursday.
Boskalis said its subsidiary Smit Salvage has reached an agreement with the United Nations Development Program to transfer more than one million barrels of oil from the decaying tanker FSO Safer. A specialized support vessel, the Ndeavour, set sail for the East African nation of Djibouti on Friday to prepare for the mission, the company said.
The announcement came just over a month after the UN said it had signed a deal to buy a very large vessel that can hold oil pumped out of Safer.
The Japanese-made Safer was built in the 1970s and sold to the Yemeni government in the 1980s to store up to 3 million barrels of oil pumped from the Marib fields, a province in eastern Yemen. With the impoverished Arabian Peninsula country mired in civil war for years, no annual maintenance has been carried out since 2015 on the ship, which is 360 meters (1,181 feet) long and has 34 storage tanks.
In 2020, internal documents obtained by The Associated Press showed that seawater has entered Safer’s engine compartment, causing pipe damage and increasing the risk of sinking. Rust has covered parts of the tanker and leaked the inert gas that prevents the tanks from collecting flammable gases.
UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner called the agreement with Boskalis “another critical milestone in Operation Stop the Red Sea Spill” to transfer oil from FSO Safer.
“We look forward to working with Boskalis and other leading experts to prevent a humanitarian, environmental and economic disaster,” he added, while appealing to governments and businesses to help raise the remaining $29 million needed to fund the operation.
“A huge oil disaster is looming, which could have serious humanitarian, environmental and economic implications. But now we have a chance to avert this disaster,” Dutch Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Minister Liesje Schreinemacher said in a statement The Dutch government worked with the UNDP to raise funds for the mission.
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