For several years, the FSO Safer, a floating oil storage and offloading vessel, moored in the Red Sea north of the Yemeni city of Al Hudaydah, may be an environmental disaster waiting to happen. The ship has been held as a virtual hostage in the ongoing Yemeni civil war. A converted 400,000 DWT ultra large crude carrier (ULCC), built in 1976, the ship now contains about 1.14 million barrels of oil valued at up to US$80 million. The ship has been progressively deteriorating due to a lack of maintenance and supplies, and many are concerned that the Safer is in imminent risk of sinking, fire, or explosion.

Update: The F.S.O. Safer—pronounced “Saffer”—is named for a patch of desert near the city of Marib, in central Yemen, where the country’s first reserves of crude oil were discovered.

Should the Safer sink or explode, a massive spill would be disastrous, potentially four times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill of 1999.

Such a spill would likely close the ports of Hudaydah and As-Salif for weeks, disrupting the food aid on which half the population of Yemen depends. This could also cause a lack of fuel, necessary for pumping or delivering water, and could disrupt desalination plants in the area. A spill would also shut down the fishing industry on which 1.7 million people rely, and could disrupt world trade passing through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. In the media, the Safer has been repeatedly referred to as a “floating bomb.”

While the risk may be imminent, it is not new. Warnings of environmental disaster have been raised for several years now. Here is a video from a year ago that highlights the potential scope of such a catastrophe.

The Environmental Catastrophe We Could Actually Stop

Thanks to Alaric Bond, Larry Witmer and Karen Lorentz for contributing to this post.