Blinken recalls that “the entire operation, including the safe removal of ‘Safer’, has not yet finished”
MADRID, 12 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Secretary of the Department of State of the United States, Antony Blinken, the end of the transfer of crude from the oil tanker ‘Safer’ in the Red Sea announced this Friday by the United Nations.
“I welcome the news that the UN has completed a complex maritime operation in the Red Sea to safely unload all of the oil ‘Safer’, a decaying 47-year-old supertanker moored off the Red Sea coast of Yemen. “Blinken said in a statement.
The head of the State Department has admitted that he was concerned because “the ‘Safer’ ran the risk of suffering an oil spill four times greater than the Exxon Valdez disaster”, which in March 1989 collided with a reef spilling approximately 41 million liters of crude oil into the sea.
Thus, he has indicated that cleaning up a spill of this type not only “would have cost tens of billions of dollars”, but also “would have been an environmental, economic and humanitarian catastrophe for the region”.
THE COMPLETE OPERATION “HASN’T FINISHED YET”
The US government considers that “this operation serves as a solid model for future international coordination and cooperation to proactively prevent crises before they occur.”
However, they have stressed that “the complete operation, including the safe elimination of ‘Safer’, has not yet finished”, although an immediate crisis has been avoided.
Thus, Blinken has thanked the UN Coordinator for Yemen, David Gressly, for leading the project to “address this problem” and other international partners for their donations “to this important effort”, but has assured that a great economic effort to face other risks.
“The UN urgently needs financial support from the international community and the private sector to fill the remaining funding gap of $22 million (about 20 million euros) needed to finish the job and address all remaining environmental threats,” explained in the note.
The United Nations announced this Friday the end of the transfer operation of more than one million barrels of crude oil stored for years inside the oil tanker ‘Safer’, stranded on the Yemeni coast due to the war that has systematically destroyed during a decade to the Arab republic and in almost permanent danger of breaking up, in what would have meant an unprecedented catastrophe for the Red Sea.
The ship, built in 1976, was converted a decade later into a floating storage and offloading facility. With its 376-meter length, the ‘Safer’ was at its peak one of the largest operational oil tankers in the world, with a load four times greater than the ‘Exxon Valdez’ spill.
