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The Red Sea coast of Yemen and its neighboring countries is at risk of an environmental disaster that could strike any day, with significant humanitarian and economic impacts. An immense oil leak and / or explosion of the FSO Safer, a floating storage and discharge unit anchored in the Red Sea, 60 km north of the port of Hodeidah, is increasingly likely. If disaster strikes, Safer could release four times the amount of crude oil that was spilled in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster (UNEP 07/16/2020), which had significant impacts on the environment and on people and their means of life in the affected areas. .
The FSO Safer Risk The FSO SAFER is a vessel that was used to store and export oil from the oil fields in the interior of Yemen around Marib. In 2015, the ship fell under the control of the Houthis and has since been neglected.
The Houthis rejected the UN requests for inspection of the ship. The lack of maintenance of SAFER with its estimated load of 1,148 million barrels of Marib light crude makes two scenarios increasingly likely:
Oil spill: Corrosion and lack of maintenance of the FSO unit over a long period of time could cause some of the oil to leak into the sea. In May 2020, a leak was discovered in the engine room and temporarily fixed. A reappearance of this leak and uncontrollably flowing water into the engine room could destabilize and potentially sink the entire structure, likely causing a severe oil spill (Mashora Group 08/2020). Satellite images show that FSO Safer has started moving in a clockwise direction since the beginning of October. Small oil 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 (internal ACAPS analysis).
Explosion and fire on board the FSO unit: This event could be caused by the accidental ignition of the gas accumulated in the cargo tanks and the consecutive leakage of most or all of the oil to the sea (UNEP 07/16/2020).
Development of the ACAPS impact evaluation
An impact assessment based on oil spill and atmospheric dispersion modeling was conducted as part of a partnership project between ACAPS and Catapult and Riskaware.
In early 2020, Catapult and Riskaware carried out a modeling of the geographical coverage, direction and travel time of a worst-case scenario for an oil spill and the atmospheric dispersion of pollutants from a fire in Safer. (Risk Aware forthcoming on 12/01/2020). The models used publicly available global data sets of current and historical weather data to derive the prevailing weather and current conditions for the four quarters of the year. The model generated worst-case scenarios for the spill or smoke plume (deposition of particulate matter on the ground and near the surface (0-100 meters) concentration of particulate matter in the air) for each of these time periods. , in which the oil spill and the atmospheric dispersion incidents were considered independent. The impact evaluation presented here corresponds to the scenario for the last quarter of the year, from October to December.
To estimate the economic and humanitarian impacts, ACAPS applied indicators that were developed specifically for the task to each of the four scenarios obtained from the modeling.
These indicators are based on:
• available humanitarian data from the ACAPS core dataset;
• information and analysis of past ecological disasters and conflict events in Yemen;
• consultation with humanitarian experts (health, agriculture
