YANBU, 3 April 2008 — The tanker that lost power and drifted dangerously among a maze of coral shelves in the Red Sea off the coast of Yanbu early last month is still being emptied of its cargo: tens of thousands of liquid tons of oil that was bound for Jordan.
Port officials said yesterday that 31,000 liquid tons of the crude oil in the Polar, the damaged Dominican-registered ship, would be pumped to Saudi Aramco storage tanks at the King Fahd Industrial Port in Yanbu. The operation is expected to take three to four days.
“Weather conditions, including wind speed would also be factors in unloading the ship,” said Capt. Abdullah Al-Zahrani, director of the Maritime Administration in Yanbu.
The rest of the oil will be loaded on another ship, the Hellas Warrior, which was sent by Venture Navigation Co., Ltd., the Greek shipping company that owns the damaged vessel, to deliver to the port of Aqaba, about 700 km north of Yanbu, in Jordan. The Hellas Warrior, a smaller vessel, will then return to Yanbu and take the rest of the oil.
The Polar lost power about 200 km out of Yanbu after departing on March 2. The 20-year-old vessel was towed back to port a few days later.
The delay in unloading the Polar was due to the need to inspect the vessel to determine the feasibility and risk of spillage in the transfer operations, a routine procedure when vessels report damages or failures. Additional factors facilitated a thorough examination because of the proximity of the port to the water intakes for the water desalination and power plants.
Oil from the Eastern Province is piped across the Kingdom for export from this northwestern port city. The western coast of Saudi Arabia is a maze of coral heads that can potentially damage and sink sea vessels. An accident involving a full oil tanker colliding with these underwater columns has the potential to cause a major environmental disaster.
