<
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/11/the-ship-that-became-a-bomb>
"Soon, a vast, decrepit oil tanker in the Red Sea will likely sink, catch fire,
or explode. The vessel, the F.S.O. Safer—pronounced “Saffer”—is named for a
patch of desert near the city of Marib, in central Yemen, where the country’s
first reserves of crude oil were discovered. In 1987, the Safer was redesigned
as a floating storage-and-off-loading facility, or F.S.O., becoming the
terminus of a pipeline that began at the Marib oil fields and proceeded
westward, across mountains and five miles of seafloor. The ship has been moored
there ever since, and recently it has degraded to the verge of collapse. More
than a million barrels of oil are currently stored in its tanks. The Exxon
Valdez spilled about a quarter of that volume when it ran aground in Alaska, in
1989.
The Safer’s problems are manifold and intertwined. It is forty-five years
old—ancient for an oil tanker. Its age would not matter so much were it being
maintained properly, but it is not. In 2014, members of one of Yemen’s powerful
clans, the Houthis, launched a successful coup, presaging a brutal conflict
that continues to this day. Before the war, the Yemeni state-run firm that owns
the ship—the Safer Exploration & Production Operations Company, or sepoc—spent
some twenty million dollars a year taking care of the vessel. Now the company
can afford to make only the most rudimentary emergency repairs. More than fifty
people worked on the Safer before the war; seven remain. This skeleton crew,
which operates with scant provisions and no air-conditioning or ventilation
below deck—interior temperatures on the ship frequently surpass a hundred and
twenty degrees—is monitored by soldiers from the Houthi militia, which now
occupies the territory where the Safer is situated. The Houthi leadership has
obstructed efforts by foreign entities to inspect the ship or to siphon its
oil. The risk of a disaster increases every day."
Via Doug Senko, who wrote "If (when) it sinks and breaks apart, it will likely
close the Red Sea and Suez Canal [for] months and choke off 10% of the worlds
sea trade."
This feels somewhat like a parable for our other wicked problems such as
climate change. We’re all negotiating with each other in bad faith, while
pointing a gun at our own heads in a misguided attempt to “gain leverage”. The
looming disasters can always be ignored, via either denial or fatalism, and
then once they start happening it’s the fault of someone you don’t like.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
