Ship breaking stirs environmentalist fears

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GADDANI, Pakistan -- Dying piece by piece, the beached supertanker looms over the shore, a skeletal colossus almost too big to be imagined, and a cash cow heralding a rebirth for the country's controversial ship-breaking industry.

The French-made Sea Giant, at 73,263 tons the second-biggest ship ever built, is being taken apart at the sprawling Gaddani complex, a 10-mile stretch of sand-turned-junkyard west of the port city of Karachi.

Labor organizations have denounced working conditions at Gaddani, and international environmental groups like Greenpeace fear the rebound in ship-breaking will be a disaster for the ecosystem along the Arabian Sea coast.

But laborers by the hundreds have begun turning up from all over Pakistan, hopeful that more floating behemoths will find their final resting place here.

Hundreds of men -- bathed in sweat and clothed in ragged, oil-stained shalwar khameez -- scurry around the half-dismantled hulk of the Sea Giant like ants swarming over an abandoned picnic basket.

They work for $2 to $3 a day, in line with Pakistan's average wage, with no safety gear and no health plan -- and they are thankful to have the job in a country where unemployment is rampant.

"All you have to do is tell one person in the village that a ship has arrived and the next day the entire place will empty of men, all rushing here to see if they can find a job," said Muhammad Uzair, a laborer.

The ship, which once carried Saudi oil by the hundreds of millions of gallons to the United States, is mammoth: It soars 110 feet out of the water and is 1,360 feet long, about 100 feet longer than the Empire State Building is tall. Built in 1979, it had reached the end of its serviceable life and would have been hard to insure if it had stayed in service.

The Sea Giant arrived at Gaddani in September, the biggest catch so far among the old tankers that have come in since the government of President Pervez Musharraf cut taxes on Pakistan's ship-breaking companies by about a third.