[HN Gopher] Shipbreaking
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Shipbreaking
Author : thunderbong
Score : 174 points
Date : 2024-05-21 04:56 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.edwardburtynsky.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.edwardburtynsky.com)
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| These are probably taken at the Alang (India) and Chittagong
| (Bangladesh) Ship Breaking Yards, where they run the ships
| aground at high tide. Both visible on Google Maps satelite view:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/21%C2%B023'21.9%22N+72%C2%...
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/22%C2%B027'24.5%22N+91%C2%...
| mhuffman wrote:
| >where they run the ships aground at high tide.
|
| Probably a dumb question but what do they do on the next high
| tide? Wouldn't it interfere with their work?
| pavlov wrote:
| They just take a break from the work? The hull of the ship
| that came in on the last high tide is now broken, it's not
| going to float away.
| Ekaros wrote:
| A ship running to shore at full speed has quite a lot of
| inertia. And then they winch it further. So pretty much only
| the end is dealing with tides.
| mhuffman wrote:
| Ahhh, ok. So they ram it in and then winch it up closer to
| work on it. That makes sense. These things are huge and it
| would seem to take a bit of time to safely break them down.
| t_mahmood wrote:
| Safely?! Ha ha, unless you mean safe for the ship ...
| jojobas wrote:
| They start with superstructures etc, making the ships
| lighter. Then they pull them further up the coast as needed.
| bmelton wrote:
| Ekaros answer is definitive, but if you didn't have those
| facilities and wanted to buy more time, you could beach the
| boat during a high spring tide (which is when the solar tides
| and lunar tides are in line), which would only occurs twice
| each lunar month
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I'm not in a position to look right now, but I'm pretty sure
| there's video of this happening out on YouTube. It's pretty
| fearsome seeing these big vessels coming in under power and
| crashing into the shore. Tons of inertia.
| geetee wrote:
| I doubt it's the video you were referring to, but it reminded
| me of when YouTuber bald and bankrupt was in Bangladesh:
| https://youtu.be/iq_76McFVLo?t=1260&si=WT-yCAefa1vIHXli
| mywacaday wrote:
| Thanks for that, some pretty cool street view panoramas at that
| location
| FriedPickles wrote:
| VICE made a nice video on the shipbreaking here a few years back:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU0DXdAhdsA
| fbdab103 wrote:
| That is wild. Could not believe how many people were wearing
| sandals or completely barefoot.
| resolutebat wrote:
| Bare feet are the least of your problems when somebody drops
| a couple of tons of rusty steel on your head.
| jabl wrote:
| Yes, but that doesn't mean that using basic protective
| gear, like every heavy industry worker in developed
| countries, wouldn't reduce other kinds of injuries.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The entire industry is wild. Old ships have a lot of
| asbestos, plastic is burnt in heaps right next to working
| people. Life expectancy in Alang et al. isn't great.
| refurb wrote:
| That's most of the world. The idea of worker safety and
| protection is the exception, not the rule.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I feel like the music marries well with the somewhat depressingly
| industrial hardcore work on display in the ship-breaking clips:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVm8G0ipETc
|
| (El Rodeo by Kyuss)
| pjmorris wrote:
| On the topic of music, I first learned of shipbreaking from
| Mark Knopfler's song, 'So Far from the Clyde.'
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9OIucgb_4Q
| dfboyd wrote:
| These could be Battlefield 2042 screenshots of the "Discarded"
| map
| Arch-TK wrote:
| Reminded me of BF:BC2 Atacama Desert
| xyx0826 wrote:
| If anyone is interested in a game themed shipbreaking/dismantling
| things, check out Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Instead of oceanic
| ships one gets to take apart spaceships and sort the salvages
| like garbage-recycle-compost.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1161580/Hardspace_Shipbre...
| Akronymus wrote:
| I really like the gameplay of it, but the story actively makes
| it a worse product, somehow.
| arnsholt wrote:
| What is it about the story that puts you off? I might agree
| it's not a masterpiece of interactive storytelling, but given
| the subject matter I'm hard press to find a different kind of
| story you could tell with it.
| Akronymus wrote:
| How forced and in your face it is, only to then remove the
| "working yourself out of debt" part at the end and just
| destroying most of the reason to keep playing, at least for
| me. And everything being unskippable while you are stuck
| inside the small room unable to do anything but listen to
| it.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I wanted to love that game. I gave it a good go, but just could
| not bring myself to want to play it.
|
| I think the story and narrative just put me right off of it
| from the very outset for some reason. I don't know why but it
| was a total turn-off.
|
| Also the zero-G thing made sense from a setting-perspective,
| but the slowly-slowly-drifting-around with limited control was
| just frustrating and infuriating in equal measure. I am sure it
| is "realistic" but then this is a game about being in space
| tearing space ships apart so who cares about realism? If I was
| able to do things faster and with more "arcade" style movement
| then I am sure it would have been a blast, but slowly drifting
| about in treacle was not fun.
| MivLives wrote:
| I'm a big fan. For me a lot of the fun was mastering that
| movement system. The way the game is set up it incentives you
| to be fast and take risks. To get around faster you have to
| treat yourself the same as the chunks of the ship, using the
| tether to pull yourself in. You can also magnetize yourself
| to the hull and spider around like that. With upgrades and
| practice I was able to get most of the smallest level of
| ships done in one in game day.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| What in particular turned you off, the capitalistic nature of
| the story?
|
| From the Steam page, this is how the game publisher describes
| the game:
|
| > We offer you the privilege of helping turn humanity's past
| into its future by salvaging ships in zero-g. Each one is a
| puzzle, and how you solve it is up to you! Carve your way in,
| salvage everything, and maximize your profit.
|
| Seems relatively vanilla, besides the capitalism part but
| most people are relatively accepting of that edge nowadays I
| feel like.
| gnramires wrote:
| Sounds interesting. I really liked (and like) Homeworld,
| not only because of the really captivating setting and
| gameplay, but also because of the stories. They really add
| meaning to a game: it wasn't just a few ships skirmishing,
| it was (if I remember correctly?) a civilization searching
| for their home and fighting for survival, while facing
| various challenges and contact with other civilizations (or
| were they other species?).
| hiddencost wrote:
| Which, BTW, is a parable about labor rights and how debt is
| used to control workers.
| resolutebat wrote:
| Shipbreaking is an absurdly dangerous job, and the "Brothers"
| sequence in Workingman's Death covers this.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workingman%27s_Death
| t_mahmood wrote:
| I have not keeping track of this anymore, but, from the last
| time I read on this:
|
| A LOT of people go disabled, amputee from freak accidents, on a
| regular basis, and receive NO support from the owners, and life
| expectancy go really, really low.
|
| The whole business is controlled by a group of people, who have
| no ethical sense, and environmental concern, and these people
| are so powerful, no one can do anything to them.
|
| There's no pollution control here, so all the harmful chemicals
| go into the sea, and land, which basically have made the whole
| seaside area unusable for crops, which mean, people who were
| farmers can't farm anymore, and have to work in these yards.
| And die pretty fast. And obviously, as the chemicals are
| getting mixed in the land, it is affecting the people too. But
| again these people are so powerful, no one can say anything
| about it.
| 2rsf wrote:
| Is it an inherently dangerous job or is it dangerous because of
| how it is managed?
| TylerE wrote:
| Both. With western automation, rules and PPE it would be no
| worse than building the things in the first place
| resolutebat wrote:
| It's probably worse than building them. When building a
| ship, we have a pretty good idea of how brand new materials
| for construction behave and have an exact plan for putting
| them together. Shipbreaking, on the other hand, involves
| chopping up enormous chunks of rusty steel of unknown but
| generally terrible condition (that's why they're getting
| broken up), meaning they can fail in unexpected ways at any
| time, plus you're basically flying blind because you don't
| have the original plans etc.
| esafak wrote:
| Steve McCurry also has a bunch of shots on this. Unfortunately, I
| couldn't find a link that conveniently has them all in one
| placed.
|
| https://www.peterfetterman.com/artists/146-steve-mccurry/wor...
|
| https://x.com/McCurryStudios/status/575680978997354496/photo...
|
| https://www.sundaramtagore.com/exhibitions/steve-mccurry2/se...
| adityapatadia wrote:
| I lived near Alang (India) and visited the shipbreaking
| operations a lot. For me as a kid, the best part was these ships
| had olives (in brine) and we could only get them from Alang.
|
| Happy to answer any questions you guys might have.
| jl6 wrote:
| Do you mean there was food still on board when the ships
| arrived?
| adityapatadia wrote:
| There is a ton of food on board when ships arrive. Remember,
| the ships have crews and they are working when they arrive.
| In fact you could find all sorts of food items and kitchen
| equipments that you would find in a professional kitchen (a
| lot of restaurants in our area just got the kitchen equipment
| for cheap).
| boppo1 wrote:
| - I've heard these breaking yards are very toxic. Do you have
| any memory of this?
|
| - olives in brine? Like leftover food supplies and somehow that
| was a staple?
|
| - What was the visit like? Stand on a platform and watch?
| Guided tour? Freedom to run amok & don't get in the
| way/yourself killed?
|
| - What were the local opinions on the industry?
| adityapatadia wrote:
| - There are all sorts of toxins on the ships. Crude oil which
| drives the ship is one component but the government asks to
| get rid of it first as long as the ship arrives. Next big one
| is asbestos which is abundant and not removed by the
| government. It lies around. I am sure there would be more of
| them
|
| - Yeah olives in brine in a sealed food tin. We did not eat a
| lot of fish back then but there were food tins of all sorts
| on those ships. I personally only picked olives.
|
| - A visit could be arranged if you knew anyone who managed
| the shipbreaking. If the ship is not broken yet, they show
| you how to climb the ship (mostly vertical steel ladders). If
| the breaking has started, they don't allow you to climb the
| ship but then you can roam around the site and inspect all
| the goods removed from the ship and buy it at whatever price
| u feel.
|
| - Local population was not that educated. People did not take
| the businesses as badly as we treat them online. They feel
| it's a normal industry like anything else and gives
| employment so they are mostly fine with it. If some worker
| loses their life (a few do every year) the families are
| compensated to the tune of $1000 to $2000 and life goes on.
| (sad I know)
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| This presumably inspired some of the scenes in the Star Wars
| series Andor.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Perhaps also BR 2047
| TrackerFF wrote:
| One of my previous (job) tasks was to monitor larger vessels, and
| analyze where they'd end up getting torn apart.
|
| Turns out western shipping companies don't like paying western
| prices for that kind of work, and try to sneak the vessels down
| to India, Bangladesh, etc. where that kind of work is much
| cheaper. But with cheaper prices comes a host of issues, from the
| environmental effects, to human workers actually performing the
| dangerous work.
|
| Sometimes these things can fail spectacularly - like when they
| try to sail or tow the vessel, end up drifting to land, and
| create huge oil spills.
| throw383y8 wrote:
| Well, West should stop dumping their garbage to the rest of the
| world.
|
| It is easy to have strict environmental regulations, if they
| are not enforced, and negative externalities are exported.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Well, West should stop dumping their garbage to the rest of
| the world.
|
| Actually the export of ships to be wrecked in Asia already
| _is_ banned under EU law and international treaties - and
| sometimes, even company owners can and do land in jail for
| violating them, as it happened to Georg Eide [1].
|
| The difficulty lies in the fact that many ships aren't
| registered in the EU countries, but in small countries like
| Antigua who don't have any incentive to help out European
| countries enforce their laws, and by many ships being legally
| hidden between layers of shell companies. It can go as far as
| there being a dedicated LLC in yet another tax haven per
| ship, and once the ship is to be wrecked, it isn't the ship
| itself that's being sold for wrecking (because that would be
| openly illegal and easy to catch and prove for authorities),
| but the LLC is being sold, and the lax attitude towards audit
| and public records requirements in the tax havens makes it
| very difficult to prove illegal intent.
|
| [1] https://www.freitag.de/autoren/julia-lauter/reedereien-
| lasse...
| jopsen wrote:
| We could require that ships they dock in EU harbours are
| owned by countries that are party to some international
| anti-ship breaking agreement.
|
| But it's a lot of paperwork :)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Still would not prevent just selling the LLC at the end
| of the ship's useful life.
|
| And I'm not sure how to effectively police that.
| Teever wrote:
| Find the names of the people involved, get a warrant and
| use the full power of that impressive global surveillance
| system that we've created to fight the global war on
| terror to surveil them and find evidence of other crimes
| that they've surely committed and prosecute the fuck out
| of them for that.
| aredox wrote:
| The maritime industry, more than "the West", is a prime
| culprit there. Let's also mention how they skirt taxation,
| the use of flags of convenience, the lack of protection for
| crews, the matrioshka shell companies...
| fifilura wrote:
| Also the clothes industry!
|
| The clothes brands claim to recycle cotton, but use 3rd
| party "recycling companies" to ship the textiles to Africa,
| where they just burn it in huge waste heaps. With huge
| environmental issues.
|
| https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blog/54589/how-fast-
| fas...
|
| Computer "recycling" in Lagos/Nigeria is another topic.
| fifilura wrote:
| A follow up
|
| Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet added a airtags in clothes
| "recycled" by H&M. Guess where they ended up?
|
| https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/jlME1e/aftonbladet-
| inve...
| 542458 wrote:
| I'm a bit confused as to how this investigation worked -
| how can they tell if clothes were ground for fiber with
| just airtags?
| aredox wrote:
| The trajectory of the last French air carriers - the Foch and
| the Clemenceau - is a good illustration of the mess it can be,
| even for former military flagships.
|
| Those military ships are of course full of asbestos - more than
| usual - and heavy metals.
|
| The Clemenceau was supposed to be dismantled in Spain, but when
| the marine nationale saw it being towed to Turkey, they
| cancelled the contract and got it back.
|
| Then another consortium offered to dismantle it in Alang but
| with special precautions. The boat left, was blocked by NGOs,
| was blocked by Egypt when it tried to cross Suez, then India
| refused to accept it. It came back to France after rounding all
| of Africa.
|
| It was eventually dismantled in the UK, after a few more
| protests (the river Tess had to be deepened, and the hull had
| to be cleaned up of any invasive organism)
|
| https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9mant%C3%A8lement_du_p...
|
| The Foch was sold to Brazil, and after much of the same drama,
| was eventually sunk in the Atlantic.
| aaron695 wrote:
| These pics are 2000 (Chittagong, Bangladesh) posted around 2009
| as you can see from the low rez. The photographer has a doco -
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0832903/
|
| As others are posting there are better videos / pics out.
|
| Good book, not too long, easy read - "Ship Breaker" by "Paolo
| Bacigalupi" - https://booko.us/9780316056199/Ship-Breaker I think
| cyberpunk, Amazon says dystopian romance.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| Someone posted this hour long documentary on shipbreaking in the
| comments a while back. Both mortifying and fascinating to see
| this industry up close.
|
| https://youtu.be/5jdEG_ACXLw
| aloe_falsa wrote:
| Paolo Bacigalupi's novel "Ship Breaker" deserves a mention here.
| It's set in Paolo's dystopian solarpunk universe, where old
| tankers are cut up to extract the last tons of fossil fuels from
| their hold, and it really emphasises how dangerous and
| unrewarding of a job it is.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Yep. It's Alang-style shipbreaking, but on the beaches of a
| near-future Louisiana.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| Shipbreaking, not to be confused with Shipwrecking which was the
| legendary practice of costal piracy where ships were lured to the
| rocks by fake lighthouses as depicted by Alfred Hitchcock in the
| 1939 classic Jamaica Inn.
|
| https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0031505/?ref_=nm_flmg_c_40_dr
| ggm wrote:
| I met a captain whose job was to drive these kinds of vessels up
| onto the strand at Cox's bazaar. He said it was the saddest job
| he'd ever had. A lifetime of avoiding irretrievable beaching and
| then.. get a good line, and ram it up a beach to a final,
| terminal stop.
| cies wrote:
| There was an AlJazeera docu about in the series of "Workingman's
| Death" that had amazing footage on a ship recycling yard in
| Pakistan.
|
| They've since put it on private, sadly. See it being private
| here:
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/program/working-mans-death/2012/1/...
|
| If you are interested in this, you may want to ask them to make
| it public again as the quality was absolutely stunning. Good
| interviews. Really getting into the skin of the workers lives
| there.
| tathagatadg wrote:
| This takes me to my childhood. My dad was an electrical engineer
| in India and worked at a ship repair dockyard. He once came back
| with a few shelves and cabinets for our kitchen. These were taken
| out of ships that were getting cut up in their dockyard. They
| were complete mismatches in aesthetics but it did not matter to
| his "why waste such functional ..." attitude. He was excited
| about what his "workers" could salvage from the ship. Mom didn't
| care as this was an old house where we have been living for
| generations and functionality trumped aesthetics.
|
| The most intriguing part to me was the wooden cabinet was painted
| white with something stencil printed in green. My best guess was
| that was a Cyrillic script, and about twenty five years back, it
| wasn't easy to decipher what they meant.
|
| Those cabinets are still hanging in our old house. Next time I'm
| there, all I need to do is pull up my phone and translate that
| text and get a kick out of what the original intention was for
| the sailors and what my mom is storing in it!
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