A virtual donor conference will be held on May 4 to try to raise the missing $29 million for the crucial operation to rescue an abandoned oil tanker off the coast of war-torn Yemen, the UN said Thursday.
In March, to avoid an oil spill in the Red Sea, the UN had announced that it had bought a huge tanker to be able to transfer the equivalent of a little more than a million barrels from the tanker FSO Safer anchored off the strategic port of Hodeida (western Yemen), which could break up, explode or catch fire at any time, according to experts.
The supertanker Nautica is currently underway and should first reach Djibouti in early May. But this unprecedented operation for the UN, with a total cost of $148 million ($129 million for the rescue and $19 million for the second phase), is not fully funded. “We urgently need to fill the $29 million gap in the emergency operation and raise additional funds to ensure long-term oil storage,” David Gressly, UN coordinator for Yemen, said in a statement.
In this context, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, in partnership with the UN, will host a virtual donor conference on May 4. “A huge disaster is looming on the horizon, which would have major humanitarian, environmental and economic consequences. But we have a chance to prevent this disaster,” commented Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Liesje Schreinemacher.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which is at the forefront of this issue, also announced on Thursday the finalization of the contract with SMIT Salvage, a subsidiary of the Dutch company Boskalis, to carry out the transfer of oil from the Safer to the Nautica and prepare the towing of the tanker once it is emptied.
This agreement “is another critical step in the operation +Stop Red Sea Spill”, commented the head of UNDP Achim Steiner. A SMIT ship was due to leave on Thursday for the Red Sea loaded with “generators, hydraulic pumps and other specialized equipment to conduct operations on the Safer whose systems are no longer operational,” the UNDP said.
The start of operations is expected in May. About 45 years old, the FSO Safer, which serves as a floating storage and offloading terminal, has not been maintained since 2015 as Yemen is plunged into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises due to the war between the ruling government and Houthi rebels. According to the UN, the Safer contains four times the amount of oil of the Exxon Valdez, the tanker that caused one of the biggest environmental disasters in the history of the United States in 1989.
