Opinion: An aging oil tanker has become a floating time bomb. It's an environmental disaster waiting to happen
CNNJul 23, 2019
The United Nations on Tuesday began a salvage operation to remove 1.1M barrels of oil from the FSO Safer, a decaying supertanker off Yemen's Red Sea coast.
The crew of specialists on the salvage support vessel the Ndeavor is tasked with inspecting the Safer, securely transferring the oil to another replacement tanker, and then towing the supertanker to a green recycling yard.
The clock is ticking to avert disaster. Considering that the immense economic, humanitarian, and environmental consequences of a major spill from the Safer could be catastrophic — especially in a country already devastated by war — the international community must move swiftly. Though it will be expensive, technically complex, and extremely dangerous, the salvage operation must ensure that this ecological bomb is defused without delay.
The threat posed by the Safer highlights the global shipping industry's over-reliance on fossil fuels even amid the risks posed by climate change; the logical way to reduce the frequency, magnitude, and consequences of oil spills in an era of global warming is not to simply react to immediate threats, but to accelerate decarbonization. Additionally, in the meantime, governments and international agencies must routinely enforce the oil industry's fundamental obligations to mitigate spills and reduce their contribution to the ongoing destruction of the global environment.
There's an 18% chance that the floating storage vessel Safer will leak at least 10K tonnes of oil before 2025, according to the Metaculus prediction community.