THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 41
U.N. and the Houthis began negotiat-
ing the matter through two channels.
On a political level, the special envoy led
talks. On a technical level, senior offi-
cers from the Office for Project Services,
informed by consultants from A.O.S.
Offshore—a private company with ex-
perience in the field of oil-tanker safety—
attempted to organize an inspection of
the Safer. By the summer of 2019, the
U.N. and the Houthis had come to an
accord that guaranteed the U.N. team’s
safety and made the Houthis responsi-
ble for its safe passage to the ship. The
U.N. assembled a team in Djibouti, which
would cross the Red Sea in a service ves-
sel and assess the Safer. But, the night
before the inspection voyage was to start,
a senior official in the Office for Project
Services received a text message from a
Houthi leader that said the mission had
been cancelled.
The Houthis later explained that they
were upset about a separate issue. To pre-
vent foreign weapons and other contra-
band from flooding into Yemen, the U.N.
had instituted a protocol requiring ships
bound for Houthi-controlled ports to
have their cargo inspected in Djibouti
or in international waters. For compli-
cated reasons, the Houthis wanted these
inspections to take place at the Hodeidah
port. The U.N. was adamant that dis-
cussions about an ecological and human-
itarian danger should not be appended
to other wartime negotiations. But the
Houthis were looking from the other
end of the telescope: the Safer crisis gave
them leverage in broader negotiations
concerning the war.
The sudden cancellation of the Safer
inspection shocked Ratcliffe. “I always
understood that there was a lot of risk
here in terms of environmental and hu-
manitarian impact,” he told me. “But I
did honestly believe that we would be
able to get to some kind of solution fairly
quickly.” When the Houthis withdrew
their support for an inspection, he went
on, “it became very clear to me that this
was going to be a politically much trick-
ier issue than what I had been expect-
ing—it was the first red flag.”
A
second red f lag was raised on
May 27, 2020, when an alarm
sounded on the Safer, indicating a leak
in the engine room. The chief engineer,
Yasser al-Qubati, rushed to the bottom
of the ship to see what was going on.
He was horrified to discover that a cor-
roded pipe had burst and was spewing
seawater into the engine room as if from
an opened fire hydrant.
Usually, an oil tanker like the Safer
uses seawater as a coolant. Water is drawn
inside through a “sea chest”—an exte-
rior valve that sits below the waterline—
pumped throughout the vessel, and then
discharged. Qubati determined that the
leak needed to be fixed without delay: if
the engine room filled with seawater, the
Safer would sink.
The crew worked for five days, with
little sleep, to stem the flow. The heat,
humidity, and lack of ventilation cre-
ated a vile smell deep inside the ship.
The men attempted to clear the en-
gine room of water using a pump pow-
ered by a diesel generator, but the
generator failed. Fortunately, an elec-
trician who happened to be visiting
the ship repaired it within several
hours. A rudimentary clamp was af-
fixed to the broken pipe while a welder
fashioned a patch for the hole. A team
of divers with no experience on oil
tankers was summoned from Hodei-
dah to fasten a steel plate over the sea
chest, to stop the ingress of water.
The divers succeeded—an impressive
feat—but the plate was only a partial
fix. Even today, some water contin-
ues to enter from the sea chest, and
must be pumped out using power from
the on-deck generators.
After this near-disaster, the Houthistook a more active role on the ship. A
small unit of soldiers was detailed to
board the vessel. They carried weap-
ons, which made the sepoc crew mem-
bers nervous, given their fears about
the leaks of flammable gases. The sol-
diers also installed surveillance cam-
eras all over the ship.
Following the sea-chest incident,
nobody could doubt the fragility of the
vessel. The U.N. contacted a Norwe-
gian spill-response firm called Nor-
Lense, and bought a self-inflating boom
approximately a kilometre in length.
It could be placed on the surface of the
sea and then fitted around the Safer
like a giant diaper, in case the ship
started to leak oil. Because of the break-
down in negotiations with the Houthis,
the boom has not yet been deployed,
but it has been transported to the re-
gion and is ready for use.
I was told that Qubati, the chief
engineer, could not speak to me, be-
cause he feared for his life. Many
sepoc employees have felt threatened
by the Houthis, and their communi-
cations are monitored, on and off the
ship. But, through another route, I
managed to read a report that Qubati
wrote for his superiors at sepoc soon
after the leak. He describes a ship that
“moves forwards each day towards the
worst” and a crew that works under
unbearable stress, making one desper-
ate choice after another to prevent the
vessel from sinking. He concludes,
“Science, mind, logic, experience...all“Ha ha ha. I also love that TV show.”