World’s most dangerous jobs: Tearing apart ships in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh

GADDANI, PAKISTAN—Gaddani is a three-dimensional maze of hazards. Steel, in all its forms, assaults the senses. The shrieking of metal saws is punctuated by the ferocious, unnerving thump of massive slabs falling to the sand. And the whole place smells of a four-car pileup.

This massive beach in Pakistan’s restive Balochistan province is not your typical sandy shoreline. It’s one of a handful of “ship-breaking” sites across South Asia.

Looming above the flat sand are beached ocean liners, cargo ships and oil tankers that once brought goods to markets.

Having served their purpose, they are now the world’s largest hunks of trash. They can’t be left adrift at sea, and no one will pay to keep them at port. So they end up here, awaiting the blow torches and gas cutters.

The ships do not succumb easily. They were built to endure violent ocean storms and haul cargo weighing thousands of tons. Moreover, hidden among their viscera are some of the most hazardous substances known to commerce: complex petrochemicals, asbestos, heavy metals and random poisons — in the residue of hazardous cargo, or in parts needed to make the ships operate.

The work of destroying this epic trash is left to the world’s most desperate labourers, who earn a handful of dollars a day, and benefit from only rudimentary safety precautions. It is a gruelling and dangerous pursuit — by some assessments, the world’s deadliest job.

“Ship breaking is an incredibly dangerous industry; we believe it’s one of the most hazardous occupations in the world,” says a Pakistan representative from the International Labour Organization (ILO), who declined to give his name because he wasn’t authorized to speak with the media. “Every year, thousands of people die at ship-breaking yards in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.”

The Searose G rests along the shore, awaiting final government paperwork before it meets its demise. Forty-five days after that bureaucracy is completed, the massive cargo ship will no longer exist, torn to pieces by a crew of about 150 men.

In the ship’s shadow sits Shah Nasim, a veritable living ghost of Gaddani.

Nasim moved here two decades ago from northwestern Pakistan. His goal: to save as much money as possible to send to his family.

He signed up with a local contractor, working for 30 cents a day at Gaddani. Though the temperatures reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit and it was by no means easy work, his job was simple and methodical. After a square piece of metal had been cut by a worker with a blowtorch, Nasim and a half dozen others would pull it from the ship’s body and load it on a crane lift.

Five years later, Nasim’s supervisor noticed he had a knack for directing the crane lift. So he tasked Nasim with standing at the base of the ship, pointing and yelling to another man working the lift’s pulley.

After three months in his new job, a metal cable from the lift snapped, catapulting metal sheets toward Nasim. The load hit him with such force that he was thrown back nine metres. When he regained consciousness, he was pinned beneath metal. The impact shattered his pelvis and broke almost all the bones in his legs.

More than a decade later, Shah Nasim says he endures constant pain. He moves with difficulty, and only with the help of a rickety wooden crutch. Even after three surgeries his bones haven’t healed properly. “My left leg is shorter than the right leg.”

Nasim passes his days on the beach, near the site of the accident that ruined his life. He says it would be “dishonourable” to return to his family when he cannot provide for them.

He says his experience makes him the best candidate to work with the labour unions as well as criticize them for what they aren’t able to accomplish.

“Many of the young men here think they are invincible. That’s not really the case, and I try to warn them,” Nasim says.

Worldwide, about 800 ocean vessels are run aground on tidal beaches each year to be salvaged for recyclable parts and machinery. Eighty per cent are sent to South Asia; about one in five come to Pakistan. The World Bank, which estimates that ship-breaking creates 8,000 to 22,000 jobs here, expects the local industry to grow, now that the government has relaxed steel taxes that had tilted competition in favour India and Bangladesh. Moreover, a global ship-building glut prior to the 2008 financial crisis left too many ships at sea, rendering many economically useless.

While everyone welcomes the work, activists argue there hasn’t been significant progress in labour conditions. Given the appalling conditions, some have even called for a moratorium on Asian ship breaking.

“Despite the possibility of proper disposal in Europe or other developed countries, the vast majority of European shipping companies continue to profit by having their ships broken cheaply and dangerously on the beaches of South Asia,” says Patrizia Heidegger, executive director of the NGO Shipbreaking Platform.

Tales of carnage are commonplace. One man says his brother died after being electrocuted. Another says three men died in October after a gas tank fell on them. Many perish in accidents like the one that crushed Nasim: frayed cables, chains, slings or ropes snap, hurling heavy objects downward. Others die after falling into a ship’s chambers; even if they survive the impact, they risk being asphyxiated by noxious chemical residues in the enclosed hull. Even more commonly, victims succumb to violent explosions, caused when a blow torch cuts through metal into a pocket of gas.

The workers contend that ship owners are reluctant to pay for medical treatment. Death pensions for the families of victims are hard to obtain.

Still, the men at Gaddani are thankful to be employed. They say their pay, which now approaches $5 a day for experienced labourers, is far better than any other day wage in Pakistan.

“We’re powerless to refuse this job,” says one worker. “If you had close to 12 mouths to feed back home, and were physically capable of working here, what would you choose?

“If I die, that’s only one dead person. If I don’t do this job, that’s 13 dead people.”

On a beach tinted orange from ground rust, about a hundred men break down the remaining third of a cargo ship.

Sheets of metal are scattered across the beach. Cables and large metal chains snake out of the water and into the sand. The hull is still tethered to the beach, although most of the ship slumps in huge pieces that still need disassembling. A large ship engine sits, unattended in the sand.

Despite the myriad hazards, no sections are cordoned off as dangerous. Men — many wearing traditional, loose-fitting shalwar khameez robes and cheap plastic sandals despite the sharp debris — walk the grounds oblivious to the fork lift and crane lifts scurrying about.There’s no formal supervision at the site, and though Gaddani had boasted plans for a training college, workers barely receive rudimentary training before starting a job. Instead, there’s a combination of trial and error that results in dangerous mishaps.

At one point, a crane extracts a steel sheet from a large pile, triggering the pile to avalanche toward three ship breakers. Luckily, they manage to scurry to safety.

Closer to the shoreline, men wield blowtorches to cut large pieces of steel into smaller ones. Though the men wear coveralls and rudimentary protective equipment, they complain it isn’t adequate.

Mohammad Anwar prefers to squint rather than move the eye goggles from the top of his head as he assaults a metal slab with his blowtorch. Pausing, he points to the goggles’ tinted lenses, pockmarked by the tiny sparks that fly from the metal and into his face. “I can’t exactly see through this,” he explains. “Don’t you think it would be more dangerous for me to use these?”

He says that every few days, a co-worker is taken to the makeshift clinic. There are no doctors, so someone puts a few drops into the worker’s injured eye and bandages it. Sometimes, the man isn’t able to see again for a few days. Other times, Anwar says, they never see again.

In a small town between Karachi and Gaddani, the men can purchase coveralls and gum boots. They are expensive, and not provided by the employers. Still, the veterans urge new workers to buy the equipment as soon as they can.

Standing about 7.5 metres above the ground, Anwar and some other workers slowly cut a slab of steel that contains the engine. This, he says, is the most terrifying part of his job.

“We don’t know if there’s a pocket of gas or a puddle of oil that we may hit with our blow torches while cutting.

“If we hit that gas pocket, there’ll be an explosion. Even if we survive, some of us will lose our hands, break our legs. After that there’s no guarantee we’ll ever be able to work again.”

There are also other health concerns. Antibiotics and trained health professionals are hard to come by. Workers have died from blood infections after being cut.

Others say the constant pounding and metal work is making them go deaf.

Greenpeace and the International Federation for Human Rights have argued that exposure to hazardous chemicals is another serious, albeit silent, killer.

“Ships are really death machines,” explains the ILO Pakistan representative. “They’re chock full of asbestos, which has been linked to diseases like mesothelioma,” a rare but deadly cancer.

“Then, there’s the cadmium and arsenic, poisonous biocides, and sometimes even radioactive substances that can be found on the ship.”

Two labour unions operate at Gaddani and both claim to have improved the lives of the workers. In July 2010, the unions successfully lobbied for a 40-per-cent increase in wages.

But Nasim Shah, who realized soon after his horrifying accident that he would never work again, says the unions’ limitations are apparent.

The Pakistan Trades and Mines Labour Union, operating at Gaddani since 1986, browbeat Nasim’s employers to pay his medical bills. After months in a Karachi hospital, Nasim was awarded $5,000. Nasim believed the large lump sum would support his family for his lifetime.

He now realizes the payment was paltry.

“I was injured when I was in my late 30s. I had three sons, two daughters and a wife.” He shakes his head, they all live up north. “My sons can barely provide for my family. The money was gone so fast, we cannot even understand how it happened.”

So Nasim wanders the beaches of Gaddani, counselling as many men as he can find.

“I think that my only use is to try and help people like me before they become me,” Nasim explains.

“If I can’t do that, I’m not sure what I’m still doing here.”

Source: The Star