Asian yards break ships, workers

ALANG, India

When the big ships come to Asia to die, they often take lives with them. Upendra Sethi, 29, knows.

He was one of an army of laborers hired by an Indian ship-breaking yard to strip the 50-year-old China Sea Discovery for scrap four months ago. The ship suddenly caught fire, burning at least five men alive and injuring 15.

“In a matter of five minutes, the entire ship was in flames and there was complete chaos in the yard,” he recalls.

The conditions that so quickly turned the Chinese- and Canadian-owned luxury liner into a deathtrap have long been familiar along India’s grimy west coast beaches. Now they are stirring a worldwide controversy that has stung the Indian government into taking action and led to the drafting of an international agreement to police the industry.

But Greenpeace and other advocacy groups say the remedies aren’t enough.

Playing out in places such as this seaside town of Alang is a little-known drama of modern consumer life.

The ships that come here on their final voyage have spent decades carrying vacationers on cruises or delivering cars and bicycles, microwave ovens and DVD players, sneakers and sweat shirts, coal and oil — all the ingredients of daily life.

Now, rusty and barnacled, they are rammed ashore and quickly cannibalized for every speck of recyclable material.

These older ships, some as tall as 15-story buildings and as long as several football fields, are not broken up in the West because they are full of dangerous materials such as asbestos that would not pass health standards.

So Asia has become a cheap alternative. India used to lead the industry, but breakers there say that their business is diminishing sharply and that neighboring Bangladesh has taken its place.

International awareness of the problem has been heightened lately. In February, the French aircraft carrier Clemenceau, bound for breakup in Alang, was forced to return to France because it contains as much as 1,000 tons of asbestos.

The storied passenger liner SS France, rechristened the Blue Lady, spent weeks on a ghostlike voyage in the Indian Ocean, unable to get into any of the breakers’ yards that were supposed to strip it. Even Bangladesh turned it away. An Indian court finally allowed it to sail to Alang, and it is scheduled to arrive there in the coming days.

Ship breaking is done by uneducated migrants with little safety equipment who earn a dollar or two a day — but still twice as much as they could make at home.

The Gujarat Maritime Board, which oversees the Alang shipyard, has told Greenpeace that 372 workers have died at Alang since the ship-breaking industry came here in 1982. Bangladesh has seen 180 die and 700 injured in the past 11 years, police say.

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