Yemen's Deadly Ghost Ship

I just read an article about the FSO Safer, an oil tanker that has been taken out of service as a ship and converted into floating storage off the coast of Yemen. Apparently, according to OpenDemocracy, anyway, that's a bad thing. (All of the below quotes and the above image are from that article.)

A victim of Yemen’s current civil war, the Safer has fallen in to a dire state of disrepair, with rust spreading around her hull and on-board equipment. She is packed with more than a million barrels of crude oil, which over time is thought to have steadily released flammable gases meaning the Safer could explode if she doesn’t simply begin leaking huge volumes of oil into the sea.

Well, as long as there's a way to avoid an explosion. All we have to do is leak the three MILLION barrels of oil into the ocean.

That's a fair trade, right?

But it gets worse. The 1.15m barrels of oil on board is Marib Light, a type of crude that mixes more easily with water, explains Dr David Soud at IR Consilium, a maritime security consultancy that has been tracking the FSO Safer situation. 

Should that oil begin to flow out of the rusting hull and into the Red Sea, it could form a spill roughly four times as large as the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 – and with crude that mixes down into the water column. 

... 

That means the Safer presents a significant threat to nearby coral reefs, marine life and also desalination plants in the region that provide drinking water to nearby countries including Saudi Arabia.

Ah, so apparently leaking three million gallons of light crude oil into the ocean would be bad.

But what's the problem with just leaving the tanker in place? It's not like an unmaintained metal tanker in a salty ocean is going to be a problem, is it?

A victim of Yemen’s current civil war, the Safer has fallen in to a dire state of disrepair, with rust spreading around her hull and on-board equipment.

...

Sitting in the sea, it is corroding away rapidly as we speak.

Since civil war broke out, little or no maintenance has been carried out.

...

“Any kind of ship that sits in the sea or moves around in the sea has to be regularly maintained,” says Laleh Khalili, professor of international politics at Queen Mary University London.

...

In the absence of constant sanding and painting of the hull, the Safer has essentially been left to rot.

...

Plus, the Red Sea is a particularly salty body of water, meaning that the Safer’s hull is corroding faster than it would elsewhere in the world.

...

A giant problem begging to be fixed – waiting, rusting, creaking

Oh, that's right. Steel in salt water is going to corrode quickly and disastrously.

Honestly, though, I don't understand the idea that the tanker was simply, "converted into a stationary storage facility for the Safer oil company and brought to an offshore position near the Yemeni coast".

That's weird, but I guess it's not really different from rolling storage.