in Collection: …To Construct, .03 …Steelyards at Alang!
Image by Kai Weise The shipyards at Alang recycle about 50% of the ships salvaged in the world. The yards are located on the Gulf of Khambat, 50 kilometres southeast of Bhavnagar.
Large supertankers, car ferries and container ships are beached during high tide, and as the tide recedes, hundreds of manual laborers dismantle each ship, salvaging what they can, and reducing the rest into scrap. Tens of thousands of low-paid jobs are supported by this activity, and millions of tons of steel are recovered.
Large supertankers, car ferries and container ships are beached during high tide, and as the tide recedes, hundreds of manual laborers dismantle each ship, salvaging what they can, and reducing the rest into scrap. Tens of thousands of low-paid jobs are supported by this activity, and millions of tons of steel are recovered.
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© Kai Weise.
Reproduced by the permision of the Photographer + Alang, Gujarat… + Categorisation: Microsite: ...To Construct (Photo Essays) (primary)… |
| …at Alang, in India, on a six-mile stretch of oily, smoky beach, 40,000 men tear apart half of the world's discarded ships, each one a sump of toxic waste. Environmentalists in the West are outraged. The shipbreakers, of course, want to be left alone… | ||||
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I travelled from Bhavnagar to Alang, thirty miles to the south, on a narrow road crowded with jitneys and trucks, choked with blue exhaust, and battered by the weight of steel scrap. The road ran like an industrial artery across plains of denuded farmland, on which impoverished villages endured in torpor and peasants scratched at the parched earth. Along the way stood a few open-air cafés, where truck drivers could stop for soft drinks and food, and a few small factories, where oxygen was concentrated into steel bottles to be mixed later with cooking gas for use in the cutting operations farther south. But otherwise the roadside scenery remained agricultural until several miles before Alang. There, next to a small house on the right, a collection of lifeboats listed in the dirt. The lifeboats marked the start of Alang's roadside marketplace, where specialized traders neatly sorted and resold secondary merchandise from the ships. There were yards for generators, motors, transformers, kitchen appliances, beds and other furniture, wires and pipes, cables, ropes, life rings,… |
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…dawn spread across this gargantuan landscape -- Alang, in daylight barely recognizable as a beach, a narrow, smoke-choked industrial zone six miles long, where nearly 200 ships stood side by side in progressive stages of dissection, yawning open to expose their cavernous holds, spilling their black innards onto the tidal flats,… |
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…it is not exactly a criminal industry, but it is an amoral and stubbornly anarchic one. And it admits as much about itself: at last June's shipbreaking conference in Amsterdam one of the all-important London-based maritime insurers raised the fear that if somehow the reforms go through, even assuming they apply only to the most visible European shippers, there will be a corresponding increase in mysterious sinkings… |
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…I felt a sort of awe, and was never in a hurry to leave. After climbing back down from the main deck into the hold, I sometimes walked deeper still into the depths of the ship. It was eerie and dim on the inside, an immense man-made cavern…. it had paths made of narrow beams with oil-slick footing, and sudden gaping holes that seemed to emerge out of nowhere. If you fell there, you could certainly die. But after the glare and heat outside, it was also pleasantly cool. The workers did not seem to mind my presence, or even to wonder about it. They appeared sometimes like ghosts… |
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…Alang has become a metaphor in the crucial struggle of our time -- that between the First World and the Third, the rich and the poor. Beneath our perspectives on a shrinking world lurks an opposing reality, hidden in the poverty of places like South Asia, of a world that is becoming larger -- and unmanageably so. Do we share a global ecology? On a certain level it's obvious that we do, and that therefore, at last, a genuine scientific argument can be made for the imposition of Western knowledge. But making this argument is difficult, full of political risk and the opportunity for self-delusion… |
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| …In practice, the world is as much a human construct as a natural one. The people who inhabit it have such radically different experiences in life that it can be almost surprising that they share the same air. This is inherently hard to accept from a distance… | ||||
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…Too often we have a view of what is desirable for some other part of the world which is so detached from daily existence there that it becomes counterproductive, or even inhumane. Alang is a typical case… |
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| Text citations from: The Shipbreakers, by William Langewiesche |
