The United Nations said Tuesday that a long-awaited operation has begun to remove more than a million barrels of oil from an aging supertanker off Yemen's Red Sea coast, averting a potential environmental disaster. "As of this morning, we are very pleased to report that the pumps are on, the pipes have been laid between the FSO Safer and the Yemen — the replacement tanker — and the first gallons of oil have in fact been pumped off the Safer onto the Yemen," U.N. Development Program Administrator Achim Steiner told reporters. The ship-to-ship transfer will continue around the clock and is expected to take 19 days. The FSO Safer was the subject of more than three years of appeals from the U.N. and environmental organizations who warned that a lack of maintenance during Yemen's civil war meant the decaying tanker was at risk of spilling four times as much oil as happened in the 1989 disaster involving the Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska. The Safer is one more casualty in the eight