Safer oil salvage is ‘excellent example of international cooperation,” Saudi envoy tells Security Council

Safer oil salvage is ‘excellent example of international cooperation,” Saudi envoy tells Security Council

NEW YORK CITY: With the imminent threat of a massive oil spill in the Red Sea averted, after the transfer of more than a million barrels of oil from the decaying Safer tanker to a storage vessel, Saudi Arabia’s permanent representative to the UN on Wednesday described the salvage operation as “an excellent example of international cooperation, which has reflected positively and significantly on the humanitarian situation in Yemen.”

Abdullah Alwasil added that “without a doubt, the international will has materialized and led to the success of the rescue operation through the transfer of that great quantity of oil from Safer to the new vessel.”

The Safer has been moored in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen, near the port of Hodeidah, for more than eight years, since the start of the civil war in the country. During that time it has had little or no maintenance and its condition has deteriorated to a point where there were growing fears of a catastrophic oil spill.

It contained more than 1.14 million barrels of oil, which is four times as much as was spilled during the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off the coast of Alaska, one of the world’s worst ecological catastrophes.

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