‘Hell on Earth’ in Bangladesh: The Lives of Shipbreakers

There are many moments in life where you realize just how good you have it: you’re clothed, fed, and sheltered, and have a job that doesn’t subject you to constant broken bones, burns, malaria, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis and great risk of drowning. And that’s enough, isn’t it?

Unfortunately for the shipbreakers in Chittagong, Bangladesh, life is not that good. Every malady I listed is what faces them each day, as they disassemble old, rusting ships sent to India by first-world countries to be sold as scraps. It’s difficult to get to Chittagong – tourists aren’t allowed nearby, and if you try to bring in a camera, you’ll find yourself in jail.

DeviantArt user alexiuss has compiled all of these photographs and the following information on Chittagong, which more closely resembles hell on earth than anything I’ve ever seen.

From the journal entry:

These ShipBreakers scrap the world’s ships with little more than their bare hands.

Despite wretched conditions, they say it is better to work and die than to starve and die.

Using blow torches, sledgehammers, chisels and wedges workers break the mammouth steel behemoths.

Massive slabs of carved up ships, plunge into the water, raising clouds of mist.

After the huge pieces crash into the water like glaciers calving, they are winched onto shore where they are cut up into bite-size pieces weighing hundreds of pounds then lifted and loaded by teams of guys–who sing in rhythm as they walk lock-step carrying the very heavy inch-thick steel plates–onto trucks

These metal scraps are sold (very profitably by the owners who live in huge mansions in town) as scrap metal across the country and Asia (with some reworked into ‘new’ ships).

This ShipBreaking installation exists because of the tide. It is one of those places — like the Bay of Fundy in Canada — where a host of geographical circumstances come together to create exceptionally large differences between the twice-daily high and low tides. Coupled with a soft, shelving beach, the tides at Alang make shipbreaking possible with a minimum of construction. There are no piers or drydocks. Ships are simply run onto the shore, and sometimes even pulled by the ShipBreakers towards their final destination.
ShipBreakers live in hovels built of scrap, with no showers, toilets or latrines. You can see such hovels from space using google map:

Ship breaking is done from 7 AM to 11 PM (same crew) with two half hour breaks and an hour for lunch (supper is eaten after they go home at 11); 14 hours a day, 6-1/2 days a week (off half day Friday for Muslim observations).

Workers in Alang begin stirring around 7:30 a.m.. Some wash from a bucket on the muddy ground outside their huts. Others squat by puddles, dipping toothbrushes in the yellow water and cleaning their teeth. There’s early morning coughing all around.

I don’t know about you, but this sure as hell makes me incredibly grateful that I’m safe and comfortable in my home as a paid blogger. I can’t begin to imagine living such a life as the shipbreakers lead.

Get the whole story on DeviantArt.

Link [DeviantArt]

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