SEVERAL weeks after Houthi rebels had blown 20 separate holes in the deck of a fully laden tanker and the still burning vessel was being towed through the Red Sea amid missile fire in search of safe refuge to extinguish the flames, a question was asked. 

“It was on the daily call as we were getting in place the specialist equipment and the naval architect was asked directly, how long have we got before this blows up?” recalls Joshua Hutchinson, managing director of risk analytics and loss prevention at Ambrey.

“It might be three weeks, or it might be less than 24 hours” was the response that nobody wanted to hear.

The salvage operation to save the fire-ravaged suezmax Sounion (IMO: 9312145) prevented a major international disaster.

Over the course of 135 days an Ambrey-led salvage team, more than 20 governments and dozens of international agencies and naval operations battled a month-long firefighting operation, the threat of attack, tense diplomatic disputes and unprecedented technical and operational difficulties. 

They averted an environmental disaster that at one point threatened the supply of drinking water to more than 30m people and would have caused generational damage to ecosystems and economies, ultimately costing billions of dollars.

But the operation also exposed the significant gaps in salvage, firefighting and oil spill response capability which do not match the intensity of the attacks currently being made on merchant ships. It also highlighted why a repeat occurrence risks a major disaster for which neither the private sector nor naval forces are prepared.

Today, the Greece-flagged Sounion has safely offloaded its cargo. And in spite of the damage meted out to it last year, remarkably it is being considered by its owners, Delta Tankers, as a candidate for repair with a shipyard in Türkiye understood to be the likely contractor. 

On August 23, 2024, as the stricken tanker burned 58 miles off the Yemeni coast under close watch by a Houthi mothership in easy range of all their weapons systems, that outcome seemed unlikely. 

The journey of Sounion was always going to be highly risky. Delta Tankers had been fully briefed by their contracted security firm, Ambrey, in advance of the voyage. It was well understood that they were a high-risk target.  

When the fully laden Sounion was hit on August 21 by three direct strikes from anti-ship missiles the tanker lost propulsion and critical control system were destroyed. 

The crew and the four man security team on board were sitting ducks. 

By August 22, the ship’s master had little choice left. An urgent distress call summoned the nearby French frigate operating under the European naval forces operation Aspides, and the crew and security team abandoned ship. 

At that point a salvage operation would have been risky, but not unprecedented. What happened next changed the course of events dramatically. 

“What no one expected was the Houthis to then board the vessel and start planting explosive ordinances to create what I would only classify as a Hollywood spectacular,” Hutchinson recounts.

Explosive charges detonated on the main decks and bridge started 19 fires and breached Sounion’s cargo tank tops. The whole operation was filmed, later to be pushed out on social media as part of a Houthi propaganda campaign.

“Prior to that happening you had a damaged ship that was a sitting duck, but it was anchored, it wasn’t sinking and response was possible. Now, suddenly you’ve got a very large crude carrier that is on fire and it is immediately a level 10 response in terms of severity”.

The EU naval operation’s mandate extended only to rescuing the crew. Anything beyond that was deemed to be a commercial arrangement.

While Ambrey were on the scene given its involvement as security providers to the Sounion’s Greek owners, they were not the immediate obvious choice as salvors. 

Other “tier 1” salvage companies were immediately approached by insurers Brit, whose Keel Consortium holds a 100% line on war risk cover for Sounion. But the situation did not “fit their risk appetite”, explained Hutchinson.

Ambrey, meanwhile, already had two tugs on standby and were contracted to put together a first response to assess the vessel and the situation. Almost immediately the complexity of the operation ahead became apparent. 

“The Houthis, of course, knew who and where vessels are operating in the Red Sea, so as soon as the tugs approached Sounion they were making direct threats to target them if they did not turn around immediately. They had crew lists and all the details — they knew exactly what was happening,” said Hutchinson.

“There were three other vessels attacked on the same day within five nautical miles of Sounion. So together with advice from Operation Aspides, we made the call that it was not the right time to continue with the salvage operation. It just wasn’t safe — if we had continued at that point in all likelihood the tugs would have been hit”.

Plans switched to preparing for a much broader worst case scenario oil spill response operation, and when a commercial salvage operation was launched by the vessel insurers it quickly became apparent that operations were going to be as diplomatically difficult as they were technically challenging. 

“Suddenly there was a lot of pressure from the regional governments and we were dealing with the Saudis, Djiboutians, Omanis, Egyptians, the Americans… the immediate question was where is this burning tanker going to end up,” said Hutchinson.

Trying to extinguish the fires where it was deemed “suicidal”, “the decision [taken] was a world first — we had to tow a burning ship 150 nautical miles north to a safer anchoring location where we could tackle the fire more safely”.

Meanwhile, huge diplomatic efforts were underway in the background to start securing the necessary military, security, salvage and logistics expertise to rescue the vessel before structural integrity succumbed to the heat of the fires raging onboard, or the ship continued dragging its anchor and ran aground. 

On August 24, the US State Department issued a statement claiming the vessel risked an oil spill into the Red Sea “four times the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster”. But even as that statement was being made, disagreements were raging between what quickly grew to more than 20 governments engaging alongside an alphabet soup of local and international agencies.

No coastal state wanted to accept the burning ship entering its territorial waters. The Saudi Arabian administration was also making clear that there was no way it was going to allow the vessel to head north and risk an oil spill that would likely hit its desalination plants, responsible for supplying potable water to millions of people.  

While the international diplomacy continued behind the scenes, the technical challenge of how to get explosives experts on board to clear undetonated devices left by the Houthis was the first problem. 

Next was the availability of equipment. 

Ambrey had the only available two tugs in the vicinity on standby, but they were both subject to US sanctions. As a UK company that did not prevent Ambrey from engaging them, but it did require some swift negotiation with the US Treasury — a task made all the more difficult because all regional governments had already agreed that US involvement in any operation was a political blocker. 

The availability of advanced salvage and firefighting equipment within the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden is extremely limited. The scale and complexity of what had happened meant that specialist tugs were mobilised from Greece and firefighting equipment flown in on chartered aircraft, along with specialists from around the world. 

Circumventing normal customs lead times to enable critical equipment to reach Sounion in time took diplomatic engagement at the highest levels. The specialists required for the salvage, firefighting and oil spill response had to be prepared to conduct their already difficult and dangerous tasks in the middle of a war zone.

It took until mid-September to assemble a flotilla of seven salvage vessels supported by three Aspides naval assets and close air support to commence the perilous towing operation north where the plan was to extinguish the flames then proceed to an, as yet unagreed location to transfer what was left of the 1m barrels of oil that had not been consumed by the fires.

By this point the diplomatic machine behind the operation had sucked in more governments and agencies, all with a view on what happens next. 

“We had agencies like the International Maritime Organization obviously, but there was the UK, the US, the EU, Greece, Netherlands, the European External Action Service… I would say at this point we had around 30 state bodies involved very proactively in what was still a commercial response to what was still a burning ship in the middle of a high-risk area”.

The most significant issue, however, was the refusal of the Saudi Arabia navy to let Sounion be towed north. Up until this point any risk of a spill would have flowed south, but the further north Sounion headed, the more dangerous it became to the Saudi desalination plants which collective supply 70% of the kingdom’s potable water.

“We were consistently engaged by Saudi military vessels during that period of time and they were tracking us throughout the operation,” said Hutchinson.

The detail of what happened next remains shrouded in diplomatic records, but various envoys were dispatched in flights and the ultimate decision to allow the operation to proceed had to be escalated to the highest court in Saudi Arabia before approval was finally granted.

From there the process of towing a tanker that had at that point been burning for over a month away from the Saudi exclusive economic zone but north to a safe enough location to finally start firefighting, was relatively speaking less eventful.

Over three challenging weeks, the fires were extinguished, cargo tanks patched and pressurised with inert gas, and the vessel declared safe. In early October, Sounion was towed north to Suez for cargo removal, which, as of January 3 this year, has now been successfully completed.

In the months since Sounion was rescued dozens of ships have been targeted by the Houthis, and while none have resulted in an operation as complex, the experience has left the industry and governments deeply concerned about the next incident.

While the technical and diplomatic challenges are evident, the larger concern is whether anyone in the private sector will be willing to engage in a repeat of the Sounion operation. 

The uncertainties that salvors may confront in responding to casualties as a result of violent attacks in the Red Sea were underlined long before Sounion was even targeted, when a Greek-controlled bulk carrier, Tutor (IMO: 9942627), was sunk in June.

Salvage firm Tsavliris group was engaged for the operation under a Lloyd’s Open Form with Scopic declared, but the vessel sank before tugs arrived.

The outcome was a $40m loss and a salvage claim likely to be more than $2m, but it is understood US insurer Travelers, which leads the slip, has so far failed to put up security for the salvage claim.

Ambrey is not talking about the financial costs involved in the Sounion salvage, but there is an acknowledgement across the industry that there is now a significant and worrying gap in response capability, insured risk and the willingness of companies to engage.

“We understood the risk and the exposure and we made a commercial decision to support that vessel,” said Hutchinson. 

“But I’m not sure the broker or the insurer did at the time. And the question for the industry as we look at an increasingly complex risk environment for shipping, is whether everyone really understands the risk in the same way? I don't think they do”.

And then there’s the bigger issue of available capacity. Shipping is a private enterprise reliant largely on private assets to come to the rescue when major catastrophes like this happen. But they are happening more regularly in areas where assets are extremely limited.

“So who pays? How does the industry address this risk? I don’t think anyone’s got that exam question answered correctly just yet,” said Hutchison.