More than fifty people worked on the Safer before the war seven remain. Now the company can afford to make only the most rudimentary emergency repairs. Before the war, the Yemeni state-run firm that owns the ship-the Safer Exploration & Production Operations Company, or sepoc-spent some twenty million dollars a year taking care of the vessel. In 2014, members of one of Yemen’s powerful clans, the Houthis, launched a successful coup, presaging a brutal conflict that continues to this day.
Its age would not matter so much were it being maintained properly, but it is not. It is forty-five years old-ancient for an oil tanker. The Safer’s problems are manifold and intertwined.
The Exxon Valdez spilled about a quarter of that volume when it ran aground in Alaska, in 1989. More than a million barrels of oil are currently stored in its tanks. The ship has been moored there ever since, and recently it has degraded to the verge of collapse. In 1987, the Safer was redesigned as a floating storage-and-off-loading facility, or F.S.O., becoming the terminus of a pipeline that began at the Marib oil fields and proceeded westward, across mountains and five miles of seafloor. 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. Soon, a vast, decrepit oil tanker in the Red Sea will likely sink, catch fire, or explode.
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