![]() ![]() At almost 1,200 feet long and 230 feet wide, it could carry as much as 3 million barrels - twice the capacity of the Exxon Valdez, built a decade later. The Esso Japan, built in 1976, was one of a class of “ultra large” oil vessels built in response to these trends. Then in the 1970s, a spike in world oil prices drove demand for even bulkier tankers that could move more crude at lower cost. ![]() In the late 1950s, the temporary closure of the Suez Canal, which had long constrained the size of such vessels due to its breadth, inspired shipbuilders to think bigger. The FSO Safer was an oil tanker built for another age. The decaying FSO Safer, with about 1 million barrels of oil aboard. But some see this mission in a less flattering light: Even if all goes to plan - and in Yemen, that’s always an “if” - it will still leave a million barrels of oil floating in a conflict zone. Where others failed, it convinced the warring parties - particularly Houthi insurgents, who control the area around the Safer - that preventing an environmental and economic catastrophe was in their best interest. Just getting this far is a diplomatic triumph for the U.N. Despite posing so great a risk for almost a decade, a vicious war in Yemen left the Safer beyond reach until May, when a U.N.-hired crew was allowed aboard to take the first steps in an emergency operation that could begin as early as today: transferring the oil to the Nautica, banishing the Safer to a scrapyard, and leaving the Nautica in its place. ![]() ![]() That could release up to four times the oil spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster, fouling the Red Sea for decades, if not centuries. Since 2019, the United Nations has likened the Safer (pronounced “suffer”) to a floating time bomb, one that could, through accident, structural failure, or attack, spill its cargo at any moment. Thus began an operation that’s the ecological equivalent of placing the pin back into a hand grenade. Two tugboats met the vessel about five and a half miles off the coast of Yemen, then guided it into place alongside the FSO Safer, a crumbling, abandoned oil tanker thought to hold 1 million barrels of crude. Ten days ago, the crew of a ship called the Nautica lifted anchor in Djibouti and motored north in the Red Sea. ![]()
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