AMMAN (AFP) – The United
Nations has warned that it would cost $20 billion to clean up an oil spill in the event of the “imminent” break-up of an oil tanker abandoned off Yemen.
“Our recent visit to (the FSO Safer) with technical experts indicates that the vessel is imminently going to break up,” the UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, David Gressly, said ahead of a conference, hosted by the UN and The Netherlands, to raise funds for an emergency operation to prevent an oil spill.
The 45-year-old FSO Safer, long used as a floating oil storage platform with 1.1 million barrels of crude on board, has been moored off the port of Hydaydah since 2015, without being serviced.
“The impact of a spill will be catastrophic,” Gressly continued at a briefing in Amman. “The effect on the environment would be tremendous... our estimate is that $20 billion would be spent just to clean the oil spill.”
The UN official had earlier announced on Twitter that the Netherlands would host on Wednesday a pledging conference for the international body’s plan to avert the crisis.
Last month, the UN said it was seeking nearly $80 million for its operation. It warned of “a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe centered on a country already decimated by more than seven years of war”.
Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a devastating war on Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, in 2015 in a bid to reinstall former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh.
The Saudi-led coalition imposed an air, land, and sea blockade in March that year, cutting off all ports of entry and restricting the flow of food, fuel, medicine, and essential goods into Yemen.
The blockade, which prevented commercial access to Yemen and delayed the arrival of humanitarian aid, has over the years spawned what has been described as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.
In the past, Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement had held the Saudi-led coalition responsible for the possible oil leakage from the deserted decaying tanker.
“We have long been calling for the maintenance of the Safer tanker. Nevertheless, the U.S.-backed forces of aggression, besides their unjust blockade, have deliberately created obstacles and prevented any maintenance,” the movement spokesperson, Mohammed Abdulsalam, was quoted as saying.