CAIRO (AP) – The United Nations is seeking $144 million on Wednesday needed to fund the salvage operation of a decaying tanker full of oil moored off the coast of Yemen, a ship whose demise could cause an environmental disaster.
The amount includes $80 million to transfer the more than 1 million barrels of crude oil the FSO Safer is carrying to storage, said David Gressly, the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator for Yemen.
The pledging conference, co-hosted by the UN and The Netherlands, comes more than two months after the UN and Yemen’s government in Sana’a reached an agreement to transfer the tanker’s contents to another vessel.
Gressly said the vessel “is slowly rusting and going into significant decay,” and could explode, causing massive environmental damage to Red Sea marine life, desalination factories and international shipping routes.
“Every day that passes, every month that passes, every year that passes, increases the chance that the vessel will break up and spill its contents,” he warned in a news briefing earlier this week.
He said the UN estimates that about $20 billion would be needed to just clean up an oil spill.
Gressly said the first phase of salvage should be completed by the end of September, otherwise it could face turbulent winds that start in October.
The Japanese-built tanker was sold to Yemen in the 1980s to store up to 3 million barrels of export oil pumped from fields of Marib province, currently a battlefield. The ship is 360 meters (1,181 feet) long with 34 storage tanks.
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.