36 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
AREPORTERAT LARGE
THE DEAD SHIP
The oil stored on an aging vessel off the coast of Yemen threatens the lives of millions.
BY EDCAESAR
S
oon, a vast, decrepit oil tanker in
the Red Sea will likely sink, catch
fire, or explode. The vessel, the
F.S.O. Safer—pronounced “Saffer”—is
named for a patch of desert near the city
of Marib, in central Yemen, where the
country’s first reserves of crude oil were
discovered. In 1987, the Safer was rede-
signed as a floating storage-and-off-load-
ing facility, or F.S.O., becoming the ter-
minus of a pipeline that began at the
Marib oil fields and proceeded westward,
across mountains and five miles of sea-
floor. The ship has been moored there
ever since, and recently it has degraded
to the verge of collapse. More than a mil-
lion barrels of oil are currently stored in
its tanks. The Exxon Valdez spilled about
a quarter of that volume when it ran
aground in Alaska, in 1989.
The Safer’s problems are manifold
and intertwined. It is forty-five years
old—ancient for an oil tanker. Its age
would not matter so much were it being
maintained properly, but it is not. In
2014, members of one of Yemen’s pow-
erful clans, the Houthis, launched a
successful coup, presaging a brutal con-
flict that continues to this day. Before
the war, the Yemeni state-run firm that
owns the ship—the Safer Exploration &
Production Operations Company, or
sepoc—spent some twenty million
dollars a year taking care of the vessel.
Now the company can afford to make
only the most rudimentary emergency
repairs. More than fifty people worked
on the Safer before the war; seven
remain. This skeleton crew, which op-
erates with scant provisions and no
air-conditioning or ventilation below
deck—interior temperatures on the ship
frequently surpass a hundred and twenty
degrees—is monitored by soldiers from
the Houthi militia, which now occu-
pies the territory where the Safer is sit-
uated. The Houthi leadership has ob-
structed efforts by foreign entities to
inspect the ship or to siphon its oil. The
risk of a disaster increases every day.
A vessel without power is known as
a dead ship. The Safer died in 2017, when
its steam boilers ran out of fuel. A boiler
is a tanker’s heart, because it generates
the power and the steam needed to run
vital systems. Two diesel generators on
deck now provide electricity for basic
needs, such as laptop charging. But cru-
cial processes driven by the boiler sys-
tem have ceased—most notably, “inert-
ing,” in which inert gases are pumped
into the tanks where the crude is stored,
to neutralize flammable hydrocarbons
that rise off the oil. Before inerting be-
came a commonplace safety measure,
in the nineteen-seventies, tankers blew
up surprisingly often, and with lethal
consequences: in December, 1969, three
of them exploded within seventeen days,
killing four men. Since the boilers on
the Safer stopped working, the ship has
been a tinderbox, vulnerable to a static-
electric spark, a discharged weapon, a
tossed cigarette butt.
Many people familiar with the Safer
liken it to the dockside warehouse in Bei-
rut, packed with ammonium nitrate, that
exploded last year. That blast killed two
hundred and eighteen people and de-
stroyed a swath of the city: nearly eighty
thousand apartments were damaged. Bei-
rut’s plight was predicted, too—six months
before the explosion, officials inspecting
the consignment of ammonium nitrate
on the waterfront warned that it could
“blow up all of Beirut.” Ahmed Kulaib,
who was the head of sepoc until recently,
described the Safer to me as a “bomb.”
Some observers also believe that the
Houthis have laid mines in the waters
around the Safer. Many coastal regions
under Houthi control have been booby-
trapped this way. If explosives indeed
surround the ship, nobody knows their
exact locations. According to sources
in Ras Issa, the port closest to the ship,
the Houthi officer responsible for lay-
ing mines in the area was killed.
Given these concerns, it is striking
that many tanker-safety experts and for-
mer sepoc employees are more worried
about the ship sinking than about it ex-
ploding. Its steel hull is corroding, as are
its many pipes and valves. Last year, the
skeleton crew had to make emergency
repairs to a cracked pipe leaking seawa-
ter into the engine room; a sinking was
narrowly averted. If the Safer goes under,
one of two scenarios is likely: it would
break free of its moorings and be dashed
against coastal rocks, or its weakened
hull would shear apart. In either event,
the ship’s oil would spill into the water.
The Safer threatens not only the eco-
systems of the Red Sea but also the lives
of millions of people. A major spill would
close a busy shipping lane. Not long ago,
a British company, Riskaware, worked
with two nonprofits, ACAPS and Satel-
lite Applications Catapult, to generate
projections for the U.K. government out-
lining possible outcomes of a disaster on
the Safer, allowing for seasonal variations
in Red Sea currents and wind patterns.
In the worst forecasts, a large volume of
oil would reach the Bab el-Mandeb
Strait—the pinch point between Dji-
bouti, on the African mainland, and
Yemen. Every year, enough cargo passes
through the strait to account for some
ten per cent of the world’s trade. The in-
surer Allianz estimated that when the
container ship Ever Given blocked the
Suez Canal for nearly a week, this past
March, the incident cost about a billion
dollars a day. Ships rarely traverse oil-con-
taminated waters, especially when a
cleanup is in progress, and their insur-
ance can be imperilled if they do. A spill
from the Safer could take months to
clear, imposing a toll of tens of billions
of dollars on the shipping business and
the industries it services. acaps esti-
mated that the cleanup alone could cost
twenty billion dollars.
In any scenario, Yemenis would suf-
fer the most. The country, which has a
