Attachments
The coastline of Yemen’s Red Sea and of its neighbouring countries is at risk of an environmental disaster that could happen any day – with substantial humanitarian and economic impacts. It is increasingly likely that there could be an immense oil leakage from and/or an explosion of the FSO Safer, a floating storage and offloading unit anchored in the Red Sea, 60km north of the port of Hodeidah. If disaster strikes, the Safer could release four times the amount of crude oil that was spilled in the Exxon Valdez catastrophe of 1989 (UNEP 16/07/2020), which had major impacts on the environment and on people and their livelihoods in affected areas.
The risk from FSO Safer The FSO SAFER is a vessel, which was used to store and export oil from Yemen’s inland oil fields around Marib. In 2015 the vessel fell under Houthi control and has since been neglected.
Requests by the UN for inspection of the vessel been rejected by the Houthis. The lack of maintenance of the SAFER with its estimated cargo of 1.148 million barrels of Marib light crude oil makes two scenarios increasingly likely:
Oil spill: corrosion and lack of maintenance of the FSO unit for an extended period of time could lead to some of the oil leaking into the sea. In May 2020, an engine-room leak was discovered and temporarily fixed. A reoccurrence of this leak and water flowing uncontrollably into the engine room could destabilise and potentially sink the entire structure, likely causing a severe oil spill (Mashora Group 08/2020). Satellite images show that the FSO Safer has started moving clockwise since the beginning of October. Small oils spills have been detected around the unit and will be monitored. It is also likely that there are sea mines in the area where the Safer is located, which could hit the moving vessel (ACAPS internal analysis).
Explosion and a fire on board the FSO unit: this event could be caused by accidental ignition of gas accumulated in the cargo tanks, and consecutive leakage of most or all of the oil into the sea (UNEP 16/07/2020).
Development of ACAPS’ impact assessment
An impact assessment based on oil spill and atmospheric dispersion modelling was conducted as part of a partnership project between ACAPS and the companies Catapult and Riskaware.
In early 2020, Catapult and Riskaware carried out modelling of the geographic coverage, direction, and travel time of a worst-case scenario for an oil spill and atmospheric dispersion of pollutants from a fire on the Safer (Risk Aware forthcoming 01/12/2020). The models used publicly available global datasets of current and historical meteorological data to obtain prevailing weather and current conditions for the four quarters of the year. Worst-case scenarios for the spill or smoke plume (deposition of particulate matter on the ground and near-surface (0-100 meters) particle matter air concentration) for each of these time periods were generated by the model, in which the oil spill and atmospheric dispersion incidents were considered to be independent. The impact assessment presented here is for the scenario in the last quarter of the year, October to December.
To estimate the economic and humanitarian impacts, ACAPS applied indicators that were specifically developed for the task to each of the four scenarios obtained from the modelling.
These indicators are based on:
• humanitarian data available from ACAPS’ core data set;
• information and analysis of past ecological disasters and conflict events in Yemen;
• consultation with humanitarian experts (health, agricu