A catastrophe waiting to happen
NOBODY KNOWS THE FSO SAFER LIKE AHMED KULAIB.
The year he joined the Hunt Oil Co. as a loading master back in 1988 was the same year the Dallas-based oil producer installed a former oil tanker it had just converted into a floating oil storage and off-loading vessel (FSO) a few miles off the coast of Yemen. The 3.1 million-barrel-capacity ship received oil pumped from the hydrocarbon-rich fields of the country’s Marib region, storing it at sea before it was off-loaded to export tankers.
The production-sharing agreement the Texans had with Yemen’s government expired in 2005, leaving the Safer Exploration and Production Exploration Company (SEPOC) in control of the ship. For years, Kulaib rose through the ranks working beside the FSO Safer’s 1,188-ft. iron hull. “I know her very well. I know her piece by piece,” Kulaib tells TIME from Cairo, where he now lives. He speaks of the Safer with a paternal nostalgia. “She was a very good vessel at a certain time. But not today.”
Kulaib was general manager at SEPOC in 2014, when members of the Shiʻite Houthi movement swept across northern Yemen and precipitated a civil war that continues to this day. Exasperated by the corruption and chaos that ensued, Kulaib left the country a few years later. His charge, the Safer, remains in place, umbilically joined to Yemen’s Red Sea coast at the end of 4.8 miles of subsea pipeline.
The giant rusting ship has had virtually no maintenance since Kulaib departed. The sea chest valves that once fed its cooling system have rusted and can’t be completely shut, he says. The ship’s fire-extinguishing system no longer functions. And power comes only from a small generator on deck that provides lighting and heat for a skeleton crew of SEPOC employees.
On May 27, 2020, a ruptured pipe caused seawater to flood the engine room. A repair job that under normal circumstances should have taken four hours ended up taking five days of nonstop work, according to an emergency case report seen by TIME. It took a team of local divers to seal the sea chests’ external openings underwater. Only then could the SEPOC’s 34 oil tanks and mixing with volatile crude fumes because of inert gases’ seeping out of corroded seals, he says. “Any spark, believe me, will end with a big explosion on that ship.”
