Samsung Heavy Industries built the Nabarima in South Korea in 2005 for ConocoPhillips, which operated the Corocoro oil field in the Gulf of Paria. The vessel had no motors of its own -- she was designed to be permanently moored, receiving petroleum from the field through a 23-kilometer pipeline system, held in place by nine anchors. Her capacity was 1.4 million barrels. In 2007, Hugo Chavez expropriated ConocoPhillips' Venezuelan assets, and the Nabarima passed into the control of Petrosucre, a joint venture between PDVSA, which held 74 percent, and the Italian oil company Eni, which held the remaining 26 percent. What had been an efficiently operated piece of infrastructure became a ward of a state oil company already struggling under mismanagement.

After United States sanctions forced production at the Corocoro field to cease in 2019, the Nabarima was abandoned with her tanks still loaded. Years of deferred maintenance had already damaged the ballast system valves. PDVSA workers filed complaints that the vessel's process, control, auxiliary, and security equipment was inoperative due to what they described as "lack of maintenance and management incompetence." In July 2020, the ship began listing to starboard. By August, water was leaking into the engine room and the bilge pumps could not handle it. Russ Dallen of Caracas Capital Markets, who tracked Venezuela's maritime industry, put it plainly: the ship "should not be in this shape except for neglect and stupidity." PDVSA's official position was that the vessel's condition was "satisfactory." Eni called it "stable."

The Nabarima's crisis was simultaneously environmental, political, and logistical. Opposition leaders and petroleum union workers warned for months that the tanker risked sinking. The government denied any danger. A team of experts from Trinidad and Tobago eventually confirmed the listing had been corrected, and plans were made to offload 550,000 barrels. On November 2, 2020, the U.S. State Department clarified that Eni's efforts to prevent a spill would not violate sanctions -- a statement that revealed how geopolitics had tangled with basic seamanship. The following day, Venezuela's National Assembly held the Maduro administration responsible for the deterioration and asked the United Nations and the International Maritime Organization to inspect the vessel. The Nabarima was a double-hulled tanker, which offered some protection against a breach, but the margin was eroding.

The Nabarima's predicament mirrored that of the FSO Safer, a similarly neglected floating storage vessel off the coast of Yemen that also threatened a catastrophic oil spill. Both ships were symptoms of the same condition: politically paralyzed states, crumbling industrial infrastructure, and international frameworks too slow to intervene. In the Gulf of Paria, where the Orinoco's nutrient-rich waters support one of Trinidad's most important fishing grounds, a spill of 1.3 million barrels would have devastated mangrove coastlines, shrimp fisheries, and the livelihoods of communities on both sides of the border. That the disaster was averted owed more to luck and last-minute diplomacy than to any system designed to prevent it. By April 2021, approximately 1.3 million barrels of crude had been successfully offloaded to another tanker, stabilizing the vessel and ending the immediate environmental threat. The Nabarima remains a reminder that neglected infrastructure does not simply decay -- it threatens everything around it.