In a remarkable achievement, the United Nations-led FSO Safer operation has successfully concluded the transfer of oil from the FSO Safer, averting a potential environmental and humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented proportions.
“I welcome the news that the transfer of oil from the FSO Safer has been safely concluded today. The United Nations-led operation has prevented what could have been an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe on a colossal scale,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
“Today is a proud moment for the many people across the UN System as well as our donors and partners who have worked tirelessly over the past months and years to avert a disaster in a country already vulnerable following protracted conflict. There is still work to be done, but today we can say with confidence that the immediate threat of a spill has been averted,” said UNDP Administrator, Achim Steiner.
“It reminds us of why we exist as the UN, to tackle some of the world’s most difficult problems, using our convening power to bring together the international community to solve seemingly impossible challenges,” said Mohammed Siddig Madawi, Safer Coordinator and Adviser, UNDP on this news.
More than 100 underwriters had been involved in the successful binding of insurance coverage for the FSO Safer operation, enabling the UN to proceed with an emergency ship-to-ship transfer to avert an oil spill that would amount to one of the world’s largest man-made environmental disasters in history.
Led by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the FSO Safer operation involved the transfer of the oil to a replacement vessel and the scrapping of the vessel at a green salvage yard. It is highly complex and involved a range of environmental, geopolitical, financial and humanitarian risks.
The FSO Safer was constructed in 1976 and converted a decade later into a floating storage and offloading facility (FSO) for oil.
Its structural integrity has significantly deteriorated as maintenance of the vessel was suspended in 2015 upon the outbreak of the conflict in Yemen.
Complicating matters further, the FSO Safer sits in waters that are designated as ‘high risk’ by the Joint War Committee in London, the body which de facto sets insurance rates and exclusions for marine war underwriters globally.
UN Resident Coordinator for Yemen, David Gressly, who has been working on the project for over a year, said the worst-case scenario has been avoided, but this is not the end of the story.
