THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 39
stert suggested that the fragility of su-
pertankers rendered them “fatally flawed”
as a species.
As Mostert wrote those words, the
brief golden age of the supertanker was
already ending. The oil crisis of 1973 had
driven up crude prices, reducing demand
and setting off a worldwide financial
crisis. The Suez Canal reopened in 1975,
making smaller tankers useful again.
The moment the Esso Japan left the
shipyard, it was a dinosaur.
Nonetheless, the supertanker was ac-
tive for a while. Archived reports from
Lloyd ’s List, a London shipping bulle-
tin, document it shuttling between deep-
water ports in the Middle East and Eu-
rope, and occasionally voyaging to the
Caribbean or the United States, even
as the ship’s economic usefulness was
waning. In 1982, it was sent to Ålesund,
Norway, and was “laid up.” That year,
about two hundred and fifty oil tank-
ers were mothballed in this fashion:
Norway’s fjords became tanker parking
lots. Many of the vessels were eventu-
ally sold for scrap, but the Esso Japan
found another purpose.
In 1983, the Hunt Oil Company, of
Dallas, discovered crude in the Marib
desert. The site of the strike was in the
Yemen Arab Republic—sometimes
known as North Yemen—about twenty
miles from the border with the People’s
Democratic Republic of Yemen, or South
Yemen. Between 1984 and 1987, Hunt
teamed up with Exxon to build a pipeline
from the Marib oil fields to Ras Issa, on
the coast of North Yemen, near Hodeidah.
For its Marib crude, Hunt needed
storage space and an export facility on
the coast. The company’s license to ex-
tract oil lasted only fifteen years, so build-
ing an onshore storage terminal at Ras
Issa—which would take years and cost
more than a hundred million dollars—
didn’t seem like a good investment. In-
stead, for about a tenth of that price,
Hunt bought the Esso Japan and ret-
rofitted it as a floating storage-and-off-
loading unit. Smaller tankers could berth
alongside it to access its oil. Karim Abu-
hamed, a manager who worked on the
conversion of the ship for Hunt, told
me that the intent was to create a “float-
ing gas station.”
The Esso Japan steamed from Nor-
way to Korea for the twelve-million-
dollar conversion, whereupon it was re-
named the F.S.O. Safer. Among other
modifications, the tanker was outfitted
with a rotating-front mooring system,
so that the ship could swing around its
bow, like a weathervane, whenever winds
kicked up, reducing strain on the hull.
The tanker arrived in the Red Sea by
March, 1988.
In the late eighties, the Safer was one
of the best places to work in Yemen. Many
of the crew members were Italian, in-
cluding some excellent chefs. More and
more Yemenis came aboard to work. One
former employee recalled that during
this period the ship was as well appointed
as “a five-star hotel,” with pristine living
quarters. Moreover, Yemen was relatively
peaceful. The discovery of oil on the bor-
der between North and South Yemen
had spurred coöperation, and in 1990 the
states merged. During this period, Abu-
hamed lived in Hodeidah, travelled to
the ship by helicopter, and windsurfed
on the weekends.
By the late nineties, the Safer had
begun to decay. In 2000, Hunt was
granted a five-year extension at Ras Issa,
but a more durable storage facility was
clearly needed. The Yemeni government
convened a committee to plan an on-
shore terminal. Abdulwahed Alobaly, an
accountant who used to work for sepoc,
the state-owned oil company, told me
that the project’s budget was about a bil-
lion dollars—a wildly excessive sum. Not
a brick was laid. Alobaly, who fled Yemen
four years ago, told me that he suspected
“huge corruption.”
Hunt was denied permission to keep
extracting oil in Yemen, and in 2005
sepoc began administering the pipe-
line and the Safer, which at that point
was thirty years old. The ship’s age was
beginning to show, but it was main-
tained well enough to pass annual in-
spections by the American Bureau of
Shipping. Seven years later, a consor-
tium led by ChemieTech, a Dubai-
based company, finally began building
an onshore terminal, this time with a
budget of less than two hundred mil-
lion dollars. Hundreds of Yemeni and
international contractors set up camp
at Ras Issa and began constructing
three enormous vats for storing crude
oil. From the site, the workers could
see the Safer floating on the horizon.
Sameer Bawa, a director at Chemie-
Tech, remembers discussing the poorstate of the ship with crew members
who came onshore. “That was what
everyone was talking about—that it
may sink at any time,” Bawa recalled.
The new oil terminal was half built
when Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, was over-
taken by the Houthis.P
resident Ali Abdullah Saleh, who
ruled North Yemen between 1978
and 1990, and the unified state of Yemen
until 2011, was astonishingly corrupt. A
U.N. panel has estimated that while he
was in power he acquired as much as
sixty billion dollars in personal wealth.
He also appears to have played a dou-
ble game with the West: he officially
aligned himself with the war on terror
while tacitly providing support for pro-
scribed Islamist organizations, to keep
foreign aid flowing in.
In 2011, the Arab Spring swept the
region, and Saleh, facing uprisings,
agreed to pass the Presidency to his dep-
uty, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. But
Hadi’s government, assailed by rival fac-
tions, was weak, and in September, 2014,
a militia led by Abdelmalik al-Houthi
seized control of the capital.
Yemen is predominantly Sunni, and
the Houthis are Zaydi Shiites—a mi-
nority of a minority. They long opposed
the misrule of Saleh, whom they ac-
cused of robbing the country and col-
luding with imperialist enemies. (The
Houthis’ slogan is “God is great, death
to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the
Jews, and victory for Islam.”) Neverthe-
less, the Houthis, whose power base lies
in the mountains of northern Yemen,
formed a coalition of convenience with
Saleh to launch their coup. In the months
after the Houthis captured Sana’a, they
won ground across Yemen, taking Ho-
deidah and marching on the southern
city of Aden. President Hadi eventually
fled to Saudi Arabia.
In March, 2015, a coalition led by
Saudi Arabia, which included the
United Arab Emirates and Egypt, in-
tervened to stop the Houthi advance.
The U.S., Britain, and France provided
intelligence, planes, naval support, and
bombs. The Saudis saw in the Houthi
advance the hand of their regional en-
emy Iran, a Shia nation. But, despite
the aerial might of the Saudi coalition,
the Houthis weathered the attacks, and
entrenched themselves in northern