'We saw the glow of the missiles:' Red Sea crisis stirs memories for Gulf War tanker salvor

Houthi attacks have set vessels on fire, with tugs responding amid a war zone, recalling a similar crisis 40 years ago

The Singapore-flagged Norman Atlantic ablaze in December 1987 after it was attacked by an Iranian warship in Omani territorial waters as it approached the Strait of Hormuz. AFP

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The Houthis struck another cargo ship transiting the Red Sea on Thursday, one of scores of attacks in the group’s blockade of the waterway that has seen oil tankers set ablaze by drones and missiles.

Four sailors have been killed and about 30 ships damaged, two of them sinking, since November when the blockade began. The Houthis say their campaign is aimed at pressuring Israel and its western allies into ending the Gaza war.

The crisis has stirred memories for Martin Eve, 80, a veteran oil tanker salvor whose tugs were involved in 50 dangerous operations to extinguish and tow blazing tankers in the Iran-Iraq war. On some days, five oil tankers would be hit.

“At night, you could see the Exocet missiles coming, you could see the afterburner glow,” he tells The National.

Iraq tried to blockade Iranian oil and fuel shipments at the northern end of the Arabian Sea, after invading Iran in 1980 and sparking an eight-year war that killed between 400,000 and one million lives. Iran followed with the same tactic, and soon the conflict would be known as the “tanker war”.

Today, the Red Sea crisis is severe as the waterway carries one third of global container shipping and is blockaded by the Houthis.

But Houthi attacks on ships, including oil tankers, are less frequent than during the Iran-Iraq war when about 450 commercial ships were hit in the Arabian Sea, many of them carrying oil.

The worst incident in the recent attacks was a strike on the MV Delta Sounion, carrying over one million barrels of oil. The ship was hit on August 22 by multiple Houthi drones and missiles, before the crew were rescued. Houthi fighters then boarded the ship, setting explosive charges, which worsened fires aboard.

It could have been one of the worst oil spills in history, devastating hundreds of kilometres of coastline, fishing waters and coral reefs. The EU naval mission, Aspides, protected a complex and dangerous salvage operation involving Houthi threats to attack salvage tugs.

On September 26, the EU declared the vessel was safe, but a western diplomat told The National that the salvage operation had been fraught with danger amid fears the tanker could explode.

The fires were only just brought under control on Monday.

For Mr Eve, such complex and dangerous operations were a daily activity.

“The first big ship incident which I was involved in during the Iran-Iraq war was an oil tanker, about 130,000 tonnes,” he says. By comparison, the Sounion was carrying 150,000 tonnes of oil.

“There was a fire in the accommodation block and she was partly sunk. We managed to get her up and get the cargo, pump the cargo over the deck and discharge it. But after that, it just became routine. There were literally dozens of ships hit, the worst day was five a day, in a single day. I was involved in responding to attacks that hit probably 50 ships.”

The seriousness of the crisis came in 1984 when the Saudi-operated tanker Safina Al Arab oil tanker was struck by Iraqi missiles. Oil soon surrounded the vessel which had been carrying two million barrels.

Salvagers from Smit International took ten tonnes of equipment to the scene, and all 30 sailors except one were rescued. Even after the fire was put out, there were concerns it could reignite.

Mr Eve says in these situations, and that of the Sounion, it’s a race against time.

“With a few holes in the deck, you need to control that rapidly. The danger is, when it's burning if you leave it too long, it can explode. Because what happens is, it's heating up because the fire's burning, the deck is heating and then it becomes more and more difficult to put it out because it can explode eventually.”

“We lost men like that. We lost people like that. We lost 12 men altogether. And one tug was sunk, another three were hit with Exocets.”

Iraq had been supplied with French-made Exocet missiles – which claimed many British ships in the Falklands war against Argentina. One hit a US warship, USS Stark, which the Iraqis – then friendly with the US – claimed had been mistaken for an Iranian tanker, killing 37 US sailors.

“These French Exocets skimmed the waves and came in at about three to four metres up, depending on the wave height, and they had ship profile targeting and usually go for the engine room, bang a hole in it, then you’ve got a huge hole in the side of the ship.”

The weapons aren’t dissimilar to low-flying cruise missiles supplied by Iran to the Houthis, but Iran and Iraq had them in much bigger numbers.

“Most of the time we got the fire out. Two or three hours or sometimes it would take a day, but no more than about 24 hours. We had a massive firefighting team. We had a big firefighting tug that we'd converted with this huge gas turbine-driven fire pump that we purchased from some North Sea rig, they could dish out 68,000 litres an hour, it could throw water nearly 200 metres. We used to carry drums of foam as well, sometimes 100 drums of foam.”

Ian Ralby, a maritime security expert and whose company IR Consilium worked on the Safer oil tanker crisis near Yemen – before the current blockade – says governments must act more decisively for problems like the Sounion.

“It's an amazing situation that one of the most consequential oil spills in history right now is being prevented entirely by private, non-state actors,” he says, saying that military naval assistance was brief.

He says modern tankers like the Sounion have an advantage over Iran-Iraq war-era tankers because they are more likely to have double hulls. But Houthi attacks often pierce the top, which can “penetrate the holds more directly.”

“It creates an opening where the lighter fractions of the oil start to escape. When the oil is contained, inert gas is pumped into any air pockets that are there, because once oxidation crosses a certain percentage threshold of just over 11 per cent then you end up with the possibility of spontaneous combustion.

“You've got these tanks that are essentially burning off constantly after the Houthis set the explosive charges. You've got all these mini fires that are burning off all gases. So you can't just put out the fire. You also have to inject inert gas. And that’s the challenge of this operation, and why it went slowly. At the same time that you're fighting the fire, you also have to be cooling everything down, injecting inert gas into the tanks and resealing it. That isn't easy to do at sea, and it certainly isn't easy to do with multiple tanks on fire simultaneously.”

Mr Ralby said it had been a struggle to source enough inert gas generators for the operation.