Despite posing so great a risk for almost a decade, a vicious war in Yemen left the Safer beyond reach until May, when a U.N.-hired crew was allowed aboard to take the first steps in an emergency operation that could begin as early as today: transferring the oil to the Nautica, banishing the Safer to a scrapyard, and leaving the Nautica in its place.

That could release up to four times the oil spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster, fouling the Red Sea for decades, if not centuries. Since 2019, the United Nations has likened the Safer (pronounced “suffer”) to a floating time bomb, one that could, through accident, structural failure, or attack, spill its cargo at any moment. Thus began an operation that’s the ecological equivalent of placing the pin back into a hand grenade. Two tugboats met the vessel about five and a half miles off the coast of Yemen, then guided it into place alongside the FSO Safer, a crumbling, abandoned oil tanker thought to hold 1 million barrels of crude. Ten days ago, the crew of a ship called the Nautica lifted anchor in Djibouti and motored north in the Red Sea.

Fishing planet boat anchor