Food, drinking water and marine life are at risk after a cargo ship attacked by Yemen’s Houthi rebels spilled oil and fertilizer into the Red Sea.
The U.S. military’s Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, said early Sunday the Rubymar, a Belize-flagged vessel carrying 21,000 metric tons of ammonium phosphate sulfate fertilizer, sank at 2:15 a.m. local time Saturday.
The ship was struck by a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile on Feb. 18 in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a waterway linking the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and had been drifting northward after taking on water. Before plunging, the vessel had already been leaking heavy fuel that triggered an oil slick through the waterway.
“It’s really devastating,” said David Rehkopf, associate professor of epidemiology and public health at Stanford University in California.
Rehkopf co-authored a study about a potential Red Sea oil spill in 2021, when the FSO Safer oil tanker carrying millions of barrels of oil was decaying and in danger of spilling. Researchers found a spill would have “catastrophic” public health ramifications for residents in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Eritrea.
Rehkopf is concerned about potential harm to marine life, which many residents rely on for food, as well as drinking water, given Saudi Arabia relies on desalination plants that filter sea water.
“Worst-case scenario is that there could be implications for the health of millions of people from pollution, and food supply and water supply effects,” Rehkopf said.
“This would be bad anywhere. I mean, if this occurred off the coast of Florida, it would be bad. But it’s exponentially worse because of the difficulties that are already going on for folks there.”
The Rubymar could leak 7,000 barrels, which is only a fraction of the oil carried by the Safer until its cargo was successfully transferred to another vessel last year. But that is still significantly more oil than was spilled by the Wakashio, a Japanese ship that wrecked near Mauritius in 2020, causing millions of dollars in damages and harming the livelihood of thousands of fishermen.
Ahmed Awad Bin Mubarak, the prime minister of Yemen’s internationally recognized government, called the Rubymar’s sinking “an unprecedented environmental disaster.”
“It’s a new disaster for our country and our people,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Every day, we pay for the Houthi militia’s adventures, which were not stopped at plunging Yemen into the coup disaster and war.”
U.S. Central Command has warned in recent days of an “environmental disaster” in the making.