Public health impacts of an imminent Red Sea oil spill

This is the F.S.O. <i>Safer</i>, described in the <i>New Yorker</i> article discussed yesterday: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28824890" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28824890</a><p>(Not often do you get to italicize a ship name and a publication in the same sentence.)

From wikipedia:<p>&gt;The ship is estimated to contain about 1.14 million barrels of oil valued at up to US$80 million, which became a point of contention in negotiations between the Houthi rebels and Yemeni government, both of which asserted claims to the cargo and vessel.<p>Now, I&#x27;m no expert but let me venture a guess that the environmental costs of the spill and any subsequent cleanup will be significantly higher than $160M. Can we just pay both sides their $80M to let someone competent tow it out and safely dispose of the oil?<p>If no government is sufficiently smart to do that someone just start a kickstarter, I&#x27;ll give you $20k.

&quot;The Safer, a deteriorating oil tanker containing 1.1 million barrels of oil, has been deserted near the coast of Yemen since 2015...&quot;<p>WTF? That&#x27;s tens of millions of dollars worth of oil. Why hasn&#x27;t someone salvaged her?

&quot;Ansar-Allah (colloquially known as the Houthis), a political and armed movement in control of North Yemen, currently has access to the Safer. As of writing, negotiations between the United Nations and the Houthis to inspect and repair the Safer have stalled indefinitely, and no long-term solutions, such as offloading the oil, have been publicly proposed.&quot;<p>Let&#x27;s just call this what it is:<p>The Houthis are holding this ship hostage to get stuff&#x2F;concessions&#x2F;whatever from the international community. Period. There are horrific atrocities on both sides of the Yemeni Civil War and from other Gulf states, but this is unforgivable on the part of the Houthis.

Predicting it now, &quot;Worst oil spill in the Red Sea&quot; as no one does anything.<p>Seriously, reading about it is like living in the world of this Onion video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;yjfrJzdx7DA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;yjfrJzdx7DA</a><p>&quot;This disaster will have been preventable. All of the warning signs are here, yet no one will have done anything about it.&quot; Indeed.<p>Will be happy to be proven wrong.

&gt; The spill and subsequent port closures will disrupt maritime transport across the Red Sea, rerouting many shipments around Africa<p>I assume this means another mess for the Suez Canal.

With my limited understanding of storing volatile liquids...<p>One approach is to fill the tanks with inert gas... But another approach is to 99% seal up any vents and rely on the fact the fuel vapor concentration in the tanks is above the flammability threshold.<p>Thats the way the fuel tank in your car doesn&#x27;t explode for example.<p>Obviously it would be good to test this regularly with sensors... but even untested it&#x27;s still more than likely not going to explode.

The obvious political solution would be for a powerful nation, such as the USA, to publicly announce &quot;An agreement must be found between rebels and government forces to eliminate environmental impacts of this ship within 7 days, with work completed within 6 months, or the USA will come in with military force, make it safe, and take the oil as payment&quot;.<p>This seems like the very definition of &quot;World police&quot;.

Why can&#x27;t the US navy deal with this? Who would even balk at an action of our Navy to stave off environmental catastrophe? Why would we even lend credence to the opinions of those who wouldn&#x27;t want intervention in this way?<p>In the past we would use our military might ostensibly to prevent the spread of communism of all things. We did whatever we wanted in Central America unchallenged, due to this excuse. In the present and future, we should use our military investment to prevent the spread of environmental damage. Something like only 100 corporations are responsible for 70% of greenhouse gas emissions. I&#x27;d be proud of a military that sent in special forces units to disable these factories that are objectively directly attacking every organism alive on earth. Pearl Harbor or 9&#x2F;11 doesn&#x27;t even compare to the environmental damage wrought upon us by the greedy people behind these corporations.

&gt;<i>&quot;For Yemen in particular, clean water is supplied mostly through groundwater pumps or water trucks, both of which require fuel. Previous fuel shortages caused by the blockade resulted in far-reaching public health impacts: for example, clean-water and sewage systems stopped operating, solid-waste collection was stalled, and electrical-grid disruptions led to blackouts affecting hospital operations, all of which contributed to a massive cholera outbreak in 2017 [6].&quot;</i><p>It&#x27;s disturbing that the authors self-censor here. The chief reason Yemen&#x27;s water infrastructure is in shambles, the root cause of the Cholera epidemic, is that the (US-backed) Saudi military systematically bombs it:<p>&gt;<i>&quot;In the water sector, we tracked attacks on water pipelines, wells, dams, desalination plants, well drilling sites, water pumps, irrigation canals, water storage tanks, water bottling facilities, water trucks and public water utilities. We found 105 incidents in which water infrastructure was targeted — including 95 Saudi coalition airstrikes on all types of water infrastructure, including humanitarian water supply projects and warehouses.&quot;</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;22&#x2F;saudi-led-attacks-devastated-yemens-civilian-infrastructure-dramatically-worsening-humanitarian-crisis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;22&#x2F;saudi-led...</a>