[ Floating oil tank "Safer" warns of a large marine disaster in Hodeida (Infographic) ]
Safer tanker is a huge oil tanker with a fixed weight of 409 thousand metric tons. "Safer" was named due to the site where oil was first discovered in Yemen. This port is used to export Marib's light oil.
The port is located on the Red Sea in Hodeida Governorate as a floating tank which is capable of loading and shiping ships with crude oil for export purposes. The oil of Marib and Al-Jouf (sector 18 in Marib) and Sector 5 oil and some neighboring fields are pumped to this port via a Yemeni pipeline which is 439 km of which 9 km are deep under the water linked to the ship Safer in The Red Sea, its reservoir capacity is 3 million barrels, with a diameter (24-26) inches. It is the first port that was established and to which oil was pumped in Yemen in 1985 - 1986.
It is said that the floating tank "Safer" is the third largest floating port in the world that stores oil with a capacity of three million barrels. All activities of this port were dedicated and stopped because of the war. All workers were evacuated because of the war while many efforts failed to unload the tank's crude oil.
The floating port contains 1,140,000 barrels of frozen crude oil as an export stock in floating port reservoirs with a cost of 70 million dollors.
The reservoir may turn into a regional disaster, due to the increasingly fears of oil spill over because of negligence in the maintenance of the reservoir or targeting it with any military action, which means one of the worst oil spill disasters in the Red Sea region.
According to government officials and experts, the reservoir is threatened by a leak due to the increasing temperature, high humidity and lack of the heating oil(a kind of fuel oil). Another reason is due to the failure of the entirely maintenance because of the unavailability of heating oil which is used to operate the boilers, and that causes the body of the tank to corrode.
The worst humanitarian disaster may occur if the huge amount of oil leaks from the tanker, causing great loss to all marine creatures. It will destroy the fish wealth of the pollution zone and the surrounding areas, which may include the Red Sea. This would lead to a very large decline in the fishing productivity of millions of Yemenis. And might cause other damages related to climate and weather.
The flow of oil leads to contamination of groundwater, especially when the water formations are very permeable, making it easy to leak oil to these formations, especially accompanied by rainwater.