The Suez Canal is blocked

I have heard arguments for a while about the danger of ever increasing size of cargo ships. But it tends to be out of our consciousness until something like this occurs. But the lower cost of intercontinental shipping affects our life in so many ways, not nearly all of them positive. It’s a big reason that we have the good and bad of globalization

 

Not to mention the rubber ducks! If you are going to capture the public imagination about a relatively invisible phenomenon...

 

The story is not over

 

Egypt seized the Ever Given, claiming damages. Now we learn about the Outlaw Sea

 

The Suez isn’t Safer (pun), and is still at great risk of blockage due to a tanker, the Suez, who is disabled and may explode if not drained. Money has not been forthcoming to do so


The Safer has more than a million barrels of crude on board: four times the volume that leaked from the Exxon Valdez. If the ship goes under, the oil will spill.

Gressly, an affable American diplomat, has led talks with the Lord’s Resistance Army on the border between Sudan and Congo, and also with Islamist rebels in northern Mali. But the Safer crisis poses distinctive challenges, not least its urgency. The ship is dangerously corroded, and its basic safety functions are disabled. A system called inerting—by which flammable gases that rise from crude oil are neutralized—has not worked since 2017. A tossed cigarette butt could spark a fireball. In its life as a working F.S.O., the Safer was manned by more than fifty people. Today, a skeleton crew of about seven Yemenis remains. It is largely to the crew’s credit that a disaster has been averted so far. However, everyone with knowledge of the ship’s condition agrees that the Safer will soon break apart, catch fire, or explode. The former chief executive of sepoc, the Yemeni company that owns the ship, told me last year that the Safer was a “bomb”.


If the oil spills, the consequences for the region will be devastating, and not only environmentally. The Safer is moored at the eastern edge of a busy shipping lane, from the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to the Suez Canal. A spill would impede supply chains and cost the global economy billions. Even without considering this wider economic harm, the total cost of the cleanup alone could be twenty billion dollars.

Can the International Community Avert Disaster in the Red Sea?
Can the International Community Avert Disaster in the Red Sea?

 

Not at all. The piece covers all that. They're trying to raise enough money and governments are being stupidly reluctant to pay to have it done

 

What is old is new again. ARRRGH