An abandoned oil tanker with over a million barrels of oil on board is an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen.

By Chris Baraniuk. Published 2-18-2020 by openDemocracy

he FSO Safer is moored five nautical miles off the coast of Ras Isa on Yemen’s west coast. | Image: Conflict and Environment Observatory

Five miles off the coast of Yemen lies a floating bomb. An oil storage vessel called the FSO Safer has been sitting more or less unattended in the Red Sea for half a decade.

A victim of Yemen’s current civil war, the Safer has fallen in to a dire state of disrepair, with rust spreading around her hull and on-board equipment. She is packed with more than a million barrels of crude oil, which over time is thought to have steadily released flammable gases meaning the Safer could explode if she doesn’t simply begin leaking huge volumes of oil into the sea. Continue reading →