Safer Floating Tanker Enters Pre-Disaster Phase!

Safer floating tanker, in the Red Sea, loaded with hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil, approaches a very critical stage. The risk of leakage warns of a massive environmental catastrophe closer than ever before, at a time when the United Nations is eluding to intervene to solve the crisis resulting from the Saudi blockade. The technical condition of the ship “Safer”, which is floating off the Ras Issa oil port, north of the Yemeni city of Hodeidah, has deteriorated to a pre-disaster level.
Safer, which has been carrying more than 1.1 million barrels of Safer light crude since the start of 2015 without regular maintenance, has begun to seep into seawater at a significant rate. This happens when the valves for preventing water from leaking out of work, and the devices for suctioning the water out of work.
A shipping source in Hodeidah confirmed that the ship’s local technical team is making attempts to avoid an environmental catastrophe that will have major repercussions and will affect all countries of the Red Sea. The source indicated that there is more than one danger threatening the ship; The first is the leakage of water into the ship, and the other is the exhaustion of the inert gas that keeps the ship from fire or exploding. This is preventing any maintenance to be carried out before the ship is discharged from the oil shipment to defuse the danger as necessary before performing the maintenance procedure.
The source denied the existence of an oil spill currently in large quantities, but indicated that there is a slight leak that began days ago from Tank No. 3, and he did not rule out the development of the risk of this leakage.
Sources in the Yemen Oil Company “Safer”, which owns the ship, confirmed recently that the ship is in the stage of real danger, it called for sending a ship equipped and capable of withdrawing quantities of oil as necessary to ward off the risk of the ship exploding, before any discussion of maintenance.
In the past few months, Sana’a sought to resolve the issue by communicating with a number of countries, and asked China, Russia and Germany to participate in the maintenance of the ship, but it finally backed away from its demands for the necessity of a third party to do the maintenance.
According to diplomatic sources in Sanaa, on August 15 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sana’a granted the international special technical team entry visas, and there is no longer any justification for the United Nations to evade its responsibility.
The source pointed out that Sana’a had dropped all the excuses of the United Nations and the countries of aggression regarding the issue, but since the entry visas were granted, the discussion of the UN technical team and its visit to the ship has disappeared.

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