The race to defuse an oil ‘time bomb’ disaster threatening the Red Sea – Grist Magazine
Ten days ago, the crew of a ship called the Nautica lifted anchor in Djibouti and motored north in the Red Sea. Two tugboats met the vessel about five and a half miles off the coast of Yemen, then guided it into place alongside the FSO Safer, a crumbling, abandoned oil tanker thought to hold 1 million barrels of crude.
Thus began an operation that’s the ecological equivalent of placing the pin back into a hand grenade…
A Plan to Avert a Vast Oil Spill Off Yemen Finally Moves Ahead – the New York Times
A decaying tanker holds about four times the amount of oil leaked in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. Experts have warned that it is an ecological time bomb that could explode or disintegrate at any moment…The tanker is moored north of the port city and was once the site of fierce battles in the country’s eight-year-old war, which created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises…