Since 1988, the hulking form of the FSO Safer has floated in the Red Sea, receiving crude oil from the bountiful Marib oilfields of Yemen. For 30 years, the ship was a critical piece of infrastructure in Yemen's booming oil industry, which at one time generated 63% of government revenue.
But the civil war broke out in 2014, and most of the Safer's crew were forced to abandon ship, leaving behind its cargo: 1.1m barrels of oil. Against mounting costs and security risks, maintaining the vessel became near impossible.
When leaks in the engine room in 2020 threatened to sink the ship, it stoked fears of what would happen if the cargo - four times more oil than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez off Alaska in 1989 - plunged into the ocean. So, the UN, faced with a "ticking timebomb" and desperate to prevent an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe, turned to an unprecedented source: crowdfunding.
The remarkable story came to its conclusion last month when salvage teams completed a multimillion-dollar operation to remove the oil from the Safer, thereby dodging a disaster that could have been "the worst spill of our era". But it was not destined to end happily, and in fact hung precariously on a rare thread of agreement between two warring parties in Yemen.
“I would describe it [Safer] as a monster,” said David Gressly, the UN’s resident and humanitarian coordinator for Yemen , who, with governments, NGOs and Yemeni businesses, spearheaded the rescue. “They don’t make them like this anymore.”
Built as a supertanker in 1976, the Safer was later converted into a floating storage and offloading platform (FSO), a vessel that stores crude oil in huge cargo tanks to be offloaded by passing ships. The vessel is owned by the Safer Exploration and Production Operations Company, Yemen’s first national oil and gas company.
Bu hikaye The Guardian Weekly dergisinin September 08, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye The Guardian Weekly dergisinin September 08, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
We're making a music video-but I can't play, or even act
I am in a lifeboat station on the south coast, standing beneath the stern of a rescue vessel, wearing a borrowed fisherman's jumper and holding a banjo. There are lights on me, and I am very much at sea.
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
The best translated fiction
Village people A chilly tone of doom infects these unsettling folk tales, following a settlement from the deep past to near future
The quintessential \"bad place\" is one of the staples of horror fiction. For Stephen King, the bad place - think the Overlook Hotel in The Shining - usually acts as a repository for a long-forgotten evil or injustice to resurface.
A labour of love Haruki Murakami revisits a hypnotic city of dreams and a tale of teen sweethearts, in material he's worked on over four decades
The elegiac quality of Haruki Murakami's new novel, his first in six years, was perhaps inevitable considering its origins. The City and Its Uncertain Walls began as an attempt to rework a 1980 story of the same title, originally published in the Japanese magazine Bungakukai, which Murakami, unsatisfied, never allowed to be republished or translated.
Leading questions The former German chancellor slights her enemies by barely mentioning them-and is frustratingly opaque on her own big calls
Towards the end of her 16-year tenure, former German chancellor Angela Merkel was garlanded with superlative titles: the \"queen of Europe\", the \"most powerful woman in the world\".
Double vision
Is the pay really that good? Do you get bored? We ask 'David Brent', 'Nessa' and 'Ali G' what it's like to make money as the lookalike of a comic creation
Robopop Teen star who does not exist
Miku is a 'Vocaloid' -a holographic avatar that represents a digital bank of vocal samples-performing sellout tours for thousands of very real mega-fans
The show must go wrong
How did a farce about a gaffe-filled amateur dramatic whodunnit become one of Britain's greatest ever exports, the toast of dozens of countries?
Europe's latest radical populist typifies a swing on the continent
Politics in Romania can be a bloody business, especially on the right. The excesses of the Iron Guard, an insurrectionary, violently antisemitic, ultranationalist 1930s political-religious militia, stood out even at a time when fascist parties were wreaking havoc in Germany, Italy and Spain. Given what is happening in Europe today, the events of that period are instructive.
It's high time to tax cannabis and fix French finances
France might not be broke, but the state of its public finances is, well, definitely not good. Total debt stands at €3.2tn ($3.4tn) - 112% of GDP. Interest payments on that debt are the second largest public expenditure after education (which includes everything from crêche, or preschool, to universities) and are higher than the amount spent on defence. And this year's budget deficit is projected to be 6%, three points above the EU's 3% limit.
