38 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
population of thirty million, is already
experiencing the worst humanitarian cri-
sis in the world. Tens of thousands of
Yemenis live in famine conditions, and
another five million face dire food inse-
curity. Twenty million people require the
support of non-governmental organiza-
tions to access basic provisions, and four
million are internally displaced.
A fire or an explosion on the Safer
could pollute the air for up to eight mil-
lion Yemenis, and would complicate the
delivery of foreign aid to the western
coast. A spill would be even more ca-
lamitous. Yemen’s Red Sea fishing in-
dustry has already been ravaged by the
war. An oil slick would knock it out en-
tirely. A big spill would also block the
port of Hodeidah, which is some thirty
miles southeast of the tanker. Two-thirds
of Yemen’s food arrives through the port.
In every projection presented to the U.K.
government, Hodeidah remained closed
for weeks; in the worst case, it did not
reopen for six months. The United
Nations, whose mission to Yemen is over-
stretched and underfunded, has no con-
tingency plan to accommodate a shut-
down of the Hodeidah port.
John Ratcliffe, an American who is
a Yemen specialist in the U.N. Office
for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs, is one of the central figures en-
gaged in the U.N.’s attempt to solve the
Safer crisis. He told me recently that
the prolonged closure of the Hodeidah
port might precipitate a famine unprec-
edented in scale in the twenty-first cen-
tury. In 2018, unicef estimated that, if
the port closed, three hundred thousand
children would be at risk of dying from
starvation or disease. Ratcliffe told methat this calculation is still valid in 2021.
“We have no Plan B,” he said. “It would
be a catastrophic situation.”Y
achts are compared by length, and
container ships by cubic capacity,
but oil tankers are compared by “dead-
weight”—the maximum tonnage that
they carry when fully laden. By this yard-
stick, the Safer is one of the biggest ever
built. Completed in May, 1976, in a ship-
yard in Japan, it measures more than
four hundred thousand deadweight tons.
It is eleven hundred feet long and two
hundred feet wide, and can carry more
than three million barrels of oil. The
month the ship was completed, the
United States was importing that much
crude about every eighteen hours.
The ship, then owned by Exxon, was
initially named the Esso Japan. Classi-
fied as an ultra-large crude carrier, it re-
sembled a giant barge more than a tra-
ditional seagoing ship. On the open
ocean, slowing from full speed to a stop
took about fifteen minutes, and required
two miles of clear water. When the ship
was fully laden, its “draft”—or depth
below the waterline—extended more
than seventy feet. It could be berthed
only in the world’s deepest ports. The
English Channel was very nearly im-
passable for the ship, and it could not
steam through the Suez Canal.
In the years when the ship was being
built, this unwieldiness was hardly con-
sidered a liability. From the beginning
of the Six-Day War, in 1967, until 1975,
the Suez Canal was closed to commer-
cial shipping, and for most of this pe-
riod oil was relatively cheap. Shipbuild-
ers and oil companies began designing
ever-bigger tankers, to make the trans-
port of crude oil more economical. Ultra-
large crude carriers were so enormous
that Exxon offered bicycles to senior of-
ficers stationed on them, to make cross-
ing the deck faster.
The huge increase in the size of tank-
ers corresponded with a rash of fatal
accidents and sinkings, most notably the
wreck of the Torrey Canyon, which
struck rocks off the coast of Cornwall
in 1967, causing what was then the world’s
largest-ever spill. At least eight hundred
thousand barrels of oil are thought to
have spilled into the English Channel.
In 1974, in an influential two-part inves-
tigation for this magazine, Noël Mo- ILLUSTRATION BY FRANCESCO MUZZI