More than 1 million barrels of oil removed from deteriorating tanker moored off Yemen, UN says

UNITED NATIONS — The transfer of more than a million barrels of oil from an aging tanker moored off the coast of war-torn Yemen has been completed, avoiding an environmental disaster, the United Nations said Friday. Before the transfer, the Safer, which Yemen used as a floating storage and offloading facility, held four times as much oil as was spilled in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska, one of the world’s worst ecological catastrophes, according to the U.N. International organizations and rights groups warned for years of the potential for a spill or an explosion involving the tanker, which had not been maintained and has damaged pipes and seawater in its engine compartment. The U.N. said a small amount of oil remains inside the Safer’s hull and that the salvage team needs to install a secure system for mooring the replacement tanker in deep water. “However, less than 2% of the original oil cargo remains mixed in with sediment that will be removed during the final cleaning of the Safer.” Gressly told U.N. reporters at a video news conference from Yemen that during the cleaning phase a sea water wash will be applied “to extract as much liquid oil as possible,” and the oil-mixed sediment will then be removed at another port. Peter Berdowski, CEO of maritime services company Boskalis, said the Safer’s former cargo was now inside a “modern double-hulled tanker.” The U.N. contracted a Boskalis subsidiary, SMIT Salvage, to remove the oil.