Decaying Tanker Has 4 Times the Amount of Oil as the Exxon Valdez

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-warn-of-likely-massive-oil-spill-abandoned-tanker-has-4-times-the-amount-of-oil-as-the-exxon-valdez/

by samizdis • 6 years ago

188 71 6 years ago

scitechdaily.com

tomohawk• 6 years ago

Houthis (backed by Iran) control it. Good luck.

wffurr• 6 years ago

FTA: "The New York Times reported on November 24 that the Houthis will grant permission to a United Nations (UN) team to board the Safer to inspect and repair the vessel in the near future."

nradov8• 6 years ago

So the inspection hasn't actually been granted. And while the ship is floating in the open sea loaded with flammable cargo it's nearly impossible to conduct the sort of structural repairs that would be necessary to stop the oil spills.

djohnston• 6 years ago

From the article it seems like they're allowing a UN team to come in and investigate/repair, and I hope they'll be allowed to do what is necessary. This would be a good moment for the UN to demonstrate its value when it is often criticised as ineffective.

samizdis3• 6 years ago

Article in Frontiers in Marine Science cited in the SciTechDaily piece.

"A Closing Window of Opportunity to Save a Unique Marine Ecosystem"

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2020.6157...

GreeniFi8• 6 years ago

It’s interesting that the article does not attribute responsibility. Ultimately, that tanker was under the control of a group of decision-makers and liability should be attributed. I say this, because what pollution is in economic terms is the movement of cost from one person’s balance sheet to another’s - whether by hook or by crook. We do ourselves a disfavour when we don’t identify how liability moves.

samizdis3• 6 years ago

According to an article in the current edition of Private Eye (a UK magazine):

The Safer has sat off our [Yemen] coast, abandoned and rapidly decaying, for the last five years. Our government-in-exile ... claims ownership of the vessel."

GreeniFi8• 6 years ago

Private Eye is one of the few publications which identifies this type of detail. I’m a regular buyer. Thanks for sharing.

ClumsyPilot• 6 years ago

My impression is that the decision makers have become very good at creating ambiguity for this exact purpose, there is even a wiki article for 'diffusion of responsibility"

For instance McLaren company has a couple thousand kegal entities sprincled around the world, and its is a relatively recent phenomena

GreeniFi8• 6 years ago

I’ll look up that Wikipedia page. Thanks.

connorproctor• 6 years ago

The wikipedia article [1] provides the history. It was used for storage by the government and then fell into the hands of Houthi forces before deteriorating.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Safer

what2build2• 6 years ago

Presumably it’s not hard to read the second paragraph, read that access is controlled by Houthi fighters and Google the name

It’s a science website not a political one

GreeniFi8• 6 years ago

There’s a difference between “control” and “ownership”. And attributing causation is not a political point, it’s a point of fact.

hn_throwaway_99• 6 years ago

I mean, while I somewhat agree with you, whether you conclude the owners are the Houthis or the Yemeni government, it doesn't really matter that much if a giant spill occurs, the damage will have been done, and trying to get something out of either the Houthis or the govt will be squeezing blood from a stone.

cosmotic• 6 years ago

I don't think the goal would be to identify liability for this one scenario, but to establish a pattern of identifying liability for similar scenarios.

Triv888• 6 years ago

stop buying from them then

hanniabu• 6 years ago

The damage will be beyond a balance sheet

crumbshot3• 6 years ago

Agreed, it just comes across as callous and inhumane to abstract the suffering of our fellow humans and other sentient beings out as merely a business cost.

A sadly common motif through, particularly on HN.

ISL3• 6 years ago

The responsibility is ours. The net downside of such a spill is so extreme that essentially any non-military action necessary to effect a successful extraction of the oil is likely to be worthwhile.

mschuster913• 6 years ago

Given the tensions in the region, anything is risky. Perhaps the only ones who could pull it off are the Swiss, but that doesn't solve the question who will pay for the effort, and who will get whatever remains when the salvaged cargo and ship is sold off.

My personal wild guess: nothing will happen, the ship will break apart, no one will dare and try to contain it for fear of getting targeted by someone's warship or drone, and only the nations who can afford it will clean up their coasts.

GreeniFi8• 6 years ago

Agreed. And the owners billed.

cbozeman2• 6 years ago

Even military action to affect successful extraction is worthwhile.

Every thing has a cost. Everything. Its very simple calculus really. What will be the short-term, medium-term, and long-term damage in dollars and lives of allowing this ship to break apart?

What will be the equivalent of using military action - if necessary?

Either decision will cost dollars. Either decision will cost lives. We either pay up front, or we pay down the road, but we will pay. We need to determine the cheaper cost and steel ourselves to pay it.

chx• 6 years ago

This is where an international navy staffed by blue helmets comes in and grabs the vessel, right? Right??

adventured• 6 years ago

Does the UN still exist?

EGreg3• 6 years ago

This is why we should work to transform the UN Peacekepeers into a militarized world police, composed of volunteers from countries all over the world. While simultaneously drawing down and disarming the world’s militaries.

UN inspectors would be allowed into any member country, to inspect potential human rights violations, nuclear and chemical weapons development, and large environmental hazards. They need to have teeth to enforce things.

The Peacekeepers should be a decentralized organization with only three main rules:

1. Your only job is to defuse existing conflicts and violence, and force warring sides to resort to using courts and diplomacy.

2. Anyone in the organization found breaking the first rule (using force to take sides or escalate a conflict, like Norriega) will be put on trial and executed if found guilty.

3. Any alumnus of the organization breaking the first rule is likewise hunted down, captured and put on trial. The only difference is, if they are not on active duty, they aren’t even empowered to carry out Rule #1 fully but must call on-duty reinforcements.

Don’t like it - don’t join the peacekeepers. Every cadet would be trained in these three rules, so no one can take over the peacekeepers and rule the world.

And there is a set of rules that all countries can abide by:

4. If there is a sectarian conflict between groups A, B and C in a region, only peacekeepers from countries and backgrounds with no serious stake in who wins can intervene. Others are sanctioned / excluded from that conflict etc.

5. The peacekeepers wear a specific and unmistakable white-themed uniform. Anyone in any country caught impersonating their uniform would constitute a criminal offense, like impersonating a police officer.

6. They all wear body cameras, they present themselves and warn any armed combatants or terrorists to put down their weapons or they will shoot to kill. They are also able to pre-emtively kill in certain situations where they can prove massive harm (eg a bomb) and that a warning could have allowed it to happen.

This monopoly on force would probably lead to a net reduction in harm, assuming it can’t be taken over or corrupted.

sradman• 6 years ago

The article is based on the following two lines in the paper/article Science, Diplomacy, and the Red Sea’s Unique Coral Reef: It’s Time for Action [1]

The reefs are also threatened by potential oil spillage from oil pipelines and offshore storage facilities. In the southern-most section of the Red Sea the SAFER tanker, a floating oil storage and offloading unit (FSO) anchored off the coast of Yemen, holds 1.1 million barrels of oil and has begun to leak its cargo, a consequence of political and military conflicts in the area which hamper remediation and international intervention (World Maritime News, 2019).

FSO Safer [2] "is a floating oil storage and offloading vessel that is moored in the Red Sea north of the Yemeni city of Al Hudaydah."

In March 2015, in the early days of the Yemeni Civil War, Safer fell into the hands of Houthi forces when they took control of the coastline surrounding her mooring.
In late November, the United Nations and Houthi leadership reached an agreement to allow a UN-led team access to Safer by January 2021 for purposes of inspection and repair.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2020.0009...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Safer

sandworm1012• 6 years ago

WTF was an oil tanker 7km out to sea being used as a storage facility for land oil? And downstream from a coral reef! This is not about offshore oil platforms. This is about oil from land wells pumped out for storage at sea. This should be illegal at an international level. Keep such oil on land where a spill is vastly less damaging and far easier to clean up.

This whole thing reads like a Captain Planet episode.

o-__-o• 6 years ago

Remember when front month oil futures went negative? This is why.

We pumped too much oil and there is nowhere for it go. Eventually infrastructure fails

sandworm1012• 6 years ago

Then pump it back down to where we found it.

baud1472582• 6 years ago

it is cheaper to just move around a FSO than build up the necessary infrastructure. And once the wells have dried up, the FSO could have been moved elsewhere at least

Neil44• 6 years ago

If anyone was as curious as me to see pics, here's a condition report from 2019.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/energysource/onboard-t...

aksss• 6 years ago

Deepwater Horizon spilled over 10 times as much oil as the Exxon spill and the affected ecosystem is more comparable to what’s at risk here than the one in Alaska. Most people reading this may be too young to even remember the Exxon spill. Deepwater seems like a better comparison.

cbozeman2• 6 years ago

This is a fascinating article on that:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/bp-oil-sp...

WalterBright• 6 years ago

Tankers need to be equipped with external ports on each side for easy ways to drain them in the event of shipwreck.

nradov8• 6 years ago

So more potential leak points? You're really optimizing for the wrong problem there.

Ancapistani• 6 years ago

It appears that this is the ship on Google Earth: https://earth.app.goo.gl/?link=https://earth.google.com/web/...

Decaying Tanker Has 4 Times the Amount of Oil as the Exxon Valdez

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