SANAA, July 16 (Xinhua) -- A UN replacement ship arrived in Yemen's Red Sea port city of Hodeidah on Sunday, in preparation to transfer crude oil from a tanker abandoned off the coast of the war-torn country since 2015, UN officials at the scene told reporters.
In the upcoming two-week first phase of the emergency rescue operation, the replacement vessel Nautica will transfer all crude from the floating supertanker Safer, before a catenary anchor leg mooring buoy will be secured to the seabed to fix the replacement ship in the second phase, according to the UN officials.
Carrying more than 1.1 million barrels of crude oil, the Yemen-owned FSO Safer, which was used as a terminal floating storage to export oil, has not undergone maintenance since 2015 because of the civil conflict.
Labeled by the United Nations a "floating time bomb," the deteriorating supertanker poses a significant risk of explosion or an oil spill, which will potentially cause a disaster four times as serious as the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in the Red Sea.
A possible explosion of the rusting ship or oil spill would kill all fish off Yemen's Red Sea coast within hours, with fish stocks taking 25 years to recover, according to a UN Development Programme report in April.
It would also lead to the closure of the essential ports of Hodeidah and Saleef, which are crucial for bringing food, fuel, and life-saving supplies into Yemen, where 17 million people need food assistance.
Last week, the United Nations said it had raised about 118 million U.S. dollars out of the estimated 148-million-dollar budget for the emergency rescue project for Safer.
Hodeidah port city has been under Houthi control since the eruption of the civil war in late 2014, when the Houthi group seized control over much of the country's north and forced the internationally recognized government out of the capital Sanaa.
