UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has purchased a large ship to store about 1.1 million barrels of oil that will be transferred from a decaying vessel off Yemen’s coast in a bid to avert an environmental disaster, officials said.
“The purchase of this vessel, this is the most significant step forward in resolving the FSO Safer issue in the last seven to eight years,” the U.N. Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen, David Gressly, told reporters in New York via video-linkup from Aden.
The U.N. has been warning for several years that the 47-year-old FSO Safer supertanker is a ticking time- bomb that could leak, sink or explode, unleashing a massive ecological and humanitarian catastrophe. –Agencies
