Yemeni workers collect rubbish piled up on the streets as garbage trucks hardly run due to an acute shortage of fuel in the capital Sanaa, on Monday. A fuel shortage is blighting life in the swathes of Yemen controlled by Huthi rebels, cutting electricity supplies and halting water pumps as warring sides trade blame. Photo: AFP

The United Nations (UN) held an unusual session on Wednesday to express fears of a "catastrophe" if a decaying oil tanker abandoned off Yemen's coast with 1.1 million barrels of crude on board ruptures into the Red Sea.

A breach of the 45-year-old FSO Safer, anchored off the port of Hodeida, would have disastrous results for marine life and tens of thousands of impoverished people who depend on fishing for their livelihood.

The UN Security Council said it had sent details of a plan for an inspection team to conduct light repairs and determine the next steps to the Huthi rebels, who control Hodeida, on Tuesday.

On Sunday, the UN said the Huthis had agreed in principle to the assessment.

But they did the same in the summer of 2019, only to cancel a UN mission from Djibouti at the last minute.

The tanker's "condition is deteriorating daily, increasing the potential for an oil spill," Inger Andersen, head of the United Nations Environment Programme, told the Council. 

"Time is running out for us now to act in a coordinated manner to prevent a looming environmental, economic and humanitarian catastrophe," she said. 

The Security Council issued a communique expressing its "deep alarm at the growing risk," and called on the Huthis to move ahead with granting access to the tanker "as soon as possible."

Effectively a floating storage platform, the Safer has had virtually no maintenance for five years since war broke out in the country where the Huthis have seized much of the north.

The tanker could break up or explode, causing a disaster that experts have said could take up to 30 years for the area's ecology to recover from.

AFP