The Wreckers
Page 31
Perhaps all these things would seem a bit less incongruous if we didn’t feel so far from the ocean. But there’s nothing to suggest that the Gulf of Cambay is only a couple of kilometres further on—no sea-smell, no wind, no cooling of the midday heat. Nothing except these dry green fields and the miles of sea-marked items. After half an hour or so, Ajay motions for us to get back into the car, and we drive on. Finally, a notice appears by the side of the road: ‘Welcome to Alang. Safety is our motto.’ More plots, more lifebelts, more dispossessed possessions. And then, finally, poking out of the tops of the scrub and the pylons, is the bridge of a ship, a white square block with narrow portholes and tear stains of rust running down its sides. Floating above the landscape, it could just as well be the outrider to some large city suburb. Seen from the road, it gives the sense of having stumbled across a large seventies office block drowned in the middle of a country field. A little further beyond, the remains of a radar mast sticks out through the branches of a tree. Then a cluster of huts, their corrugated iron roofs strapped down with an assortment of ship’s rope ladders. At the entrance to the yard, Ajay fiddles with the gears, says something in Gujarati to Mr Patel and stops the car. Two uniformed officials look in and shake their heads at us. Ajay gets out. There is an argument, and then—more calmly—a discussion. Money changes hands. We drive on.
Here, finally, is a beach and a sea. Earlier that morning, far above Alang in the plane from Mumbai to Bhavnagar, distance leant an oily enchantment to the Gulf of Cambay. The sea appeared pale and flat in the sun, and down beyond the white squares of the salt flats, a line of ships stuck out at right angles to the coastline. Out in the bay, four or five tankers lay at anchor, waiting to clear Customs before they too would be run up the beach to their graves. Once back down on the ground, things seem darker. The ground is dark, the sand is dark, the air is dark, the sea is dark. All along the seaward side of the road, sections of derelict ship loom over the walls to the ship-breaking plots. Bony cranes and winches poke up into the air, groping for unseen pieces of steel.
There is the sound of hammering, sawing, the scream of metal against metal. The sea and the land seem so immense and the implications reach so far beyond an ordinary horizon that it is difficult to take in anything except small-scale details—two dogs attacking a younger, smaller dog by the roadside, a line of washing hung outside a tiny grey-black hut, a rope and a fire extinguisher hanging on the sawn-open wall of a 40,000 container vessel. From deep inside a ship’s bow section comes a sudden bright fantail of sparks. Some of the ships are freshly beached and almost completely intact, others are now no more than a cross-section of bridge and a sliver of hull. Sliced open, the empty store rooms and cabins gape in the daylight. Not everything has been removed from the cabins before the demolition work began, and many of the cabins still have lifejackets hanging on pegs or charts on the wall. It feels somehow intrusive looking at these tiny human-scale items hanging in such a huge inhuman space, as if someone had taken a guillotine to an apartment block and left its innards hanging out for the world to see.
Until very recently, Alang was the world’s largest ship-breaking yard. It dismantles ships from 4,000–52,000 tons, and can cope with everything from passenger ferries to fish factories to aircraft carriers. It was established in 1983 with three plots and now runs to over 200, having spread all the way up the coast and absorbed the neighbouring beach of Sosiya. The beach itself is owned by the government (in the guise of the Gujarat Maritime Board), who collect customs and export dues from shipowners bringing ships to Alang, issue permits for breaking and licence the plot owners.
When Alang was set up, demand and margins were high. Owners with redundant ships to sell would advertise through a broker such as Lloyd’s of London, and ship breakers, having assessed the potential value of the scrap, would put in a bid. If successful, the owner would then be expected to deliver the ship to Alang, pay the customs dues, and hand it over to the breaker. The breaker would then hire a team of cutters and winchers on short-term contracts (no-one, not even the most skilled cutter, is engaged for longer than a month), winch the ship up the beach and begin taking it apart. It is an arrangement which has worked well for the past twenty years, partly because Alang once held a near-monopoly on the world’s unwanted shipping, and partly because the geography of Gujarat’s coast is so uniquely well-suited to the task. The beaches on the west of the Gulf of Cambay have an exceptionally shallow gradient, and are subject to exceptionally high and low tides. Ordinary daily tides rise and fall by 20 feet, fortnightly spring tides by between 30 and 35 feet. The tides and the gradient make it possible to run very large ships up the beach, stabilise them, remove all ballast and take them apart by hand. Each section from bow to faraway stern is sawn off piece by piece, winched away and cut into manageable sections. As the ship vanishes, the workers haul the remainder further up the beach until nothing but the rudder remains.
As with all things, there is a scale of desirability. The majority of ships here are no more than about twenty or thirty years old—oil tankers generally live fast and die young—so the scrap plots of Alang are filled with the industrial design flaws of the sixties, seventies and eighties. According to Ajay, a ‘good ship’ is one in which there has been minimum weight loss (no ship should lose more than 5 per cent of its unbalasted weight through natural wear and tear, though some vessels can lose up to 15 per cent) and minimum corrosion. The steel should be in reasonable condition (oil tankers are particularly coveted, since oil preserves the weight and condition of steel in a way that seawater does not), and the original workmanship should have been of high quality. Ideally, the vessel should contain plenty of well-preserved raw material—non-ferrous metals, brass, copper cabling—which fetches a comparatively high price and is easy to melt down for re-use. And if possible, the ship should have originated in either Europe or America, since US and EU vessels are liable to arrive at Alang in better condition than Russian, Korean or Polish ships. Passenger vessels are time-consuming and difficult to break because they have so many fiddly internal divisions. Once in a while, Alang does get naval ships and aircraft carriers, but most countries are increasingly jumpy about security, and the Americans have now stopped sending any military vessels to be broken abroad.
Unfortunately, Alang’s international image hangs not on its tonnages or its tidal statistics, but on its reputation as the world’s most glamorous environmental scandal. In 1989, the photographer Sebastiao Salgado shot a series of famous images of Alang—lines of ragged workers hauling ships up the beach, broken oil-tankers leaching poisons into the sea, dying cargocarriers picked apart by (so the implication went) dying workers. The photographs were published across the globe, and Greenpeace followed in their wake, agitating for international reforms to ship-breaking procedures. As an environmental campaign, Alang had it all. It was filthy, Third-World, photogenic and—as Greenpeace argued—both economically exploitative and politically corrupt. Soon afterwards, the charity scored a notable publicity coup by protesting over Shell’s intended sinking of the Brent Spar oil platform. During the subsequent enquiry, the International Labour Organisation published the findings of the Basel Convention on the safe dismantling of ships, noting that, ‘Ship breaking complies] with the principles of sustainability. Unfortunately, the procedures adopted in extracting and regenerating do not.’ For a while, it seemed as if Alang’s number was up. Strangely enough, nothing happened. The world admired Salgado’s photographs, paid desultory lip service to the dishonour of Asian ship-breaking practices and continued sending their arthritic supertankers off to the Gulf of Cambay just as they always had.
In part, that international indifference was based on bland economic logic. At present, the truth is that if ships don’t get broken at places like Alang, then they don’t get broken at all. As Greenpeace found out, the alternative to sending ships to India or Bangladesh or Pakistan is to scupper them at sea, thereby releasing all their toxins onto the ocean floor and creating what would, i
n effect, be several thousand Brent Spars a year. While ships continued to be broken at Alang, the environmental damage was at least limited to a 12-kilometre stretch of Gujarati coastline where it could be adequately monitored. No-one claimed that Alang was anything to be proud of, only that the alternative was worse. Furthermore, as things stood, only Asia and the third world could make the arithmetic of ship-breaking work. In the mid-1990s, America—galvanised by scandals of its own—introduced safe practices to its local breaking yards. Very shortly afterwards, it then discovered that the cost of safely scrapping a ship far exceeded any possible rewards from that scrap. Even in India, the high margins which had so attracted Ajay back in the late 1990s had dwindled away to almost imperceptible levels. A decade ago, the price of scrap steel was $200 per ton; now it is $70 to $100, if they’re lucky. Besides, other yards, capable of breaking much larger ships were being set up, in competition with Alang. The numbers of breakers bidding for the best wrecks had doubled, trebled, and then quadrupled. Today, the majority of ship breakers at Alang can expect to make a profit of no more than 10 per cent to 20 per cent on the value of their steel, and to pay American-style wages with American-style safety rules would cancel that fraction out completely.
Nor is it Alang’s fault that everything here is just a bit more naked than it is elsewhere; the malpractices so flagrant and the damaged physics so evident. What irritates the West about Alang—and, for that matter, the rest of India—is that it has no capacity for guile and no interest in disguise. It is simply not possible to hide eight miles of dead and rotting shipping visible from sea, air and land. It is not possible to hide the damage, or the exploitation, or the danger. Or the double standards, given that half the flags of the signatories to the Basel Convention are still flying from the masts along the beach. Perhaps in Europe and America things would be better hidden—the beach more remote, the security more effective. But sophistry costs money, and Alang isn’t paying.
Ajay acknowledges the contradictions. ‘Accidents happen,’ he says. ‘Alang is never being totally safe. Now is better, not perfect.’ He was on site last year, he says, standing at the entrance to one of the breaker’s plots when a worker cut into the hold of a cargo ship and the sparks from his torch ignited the toxic gases remaining inside. Ajay remembers the rush of the explosion, and the fire. ‘Two hundred, three hundred people killed,’ he says calmly, watching the road. ‘Many peoples.’ In theory, shipowners are legally responsible for ensuring that all toxic materials are removed from the ship before it passes through Customs. If they do not, the ship will not be permitted to beach. But corruption inevitably ensures that plenty of unsafe ships do pass through Customs, do get beached, and do kill or maim their dismantlers. In addition, the fuel the cutters use is Low Pressure Gas—the same cheap poor-quality stuff used for barbecues and storage heaters. Acetylene gas would be safer, but it would also be more expensive.
When Greenpeace returned to the site in 2001 they discovered that many of Alang’s 30,000 workers had learned to accept the devil they knew. ‘Greenpeace come at Alang,’ reports Ajay, ‘and they met two workers. They say, we could make sure Alang is stopped. Is this what you wish? Workers say, if Alang close, we have no money, we die. At least this way we are living for half a century.’
In truth, as Ajay tacitly acknowledges, there are probably only a few more years left for Alang. The new ship-breaking yard in Bangladesh was only started up five years ago, but already it is having an impact on Alang’s trade. Between 1998–99, Alang broke 361 ships with a total tonnage of 3,037,882 tons; by 2003–4, that figure had been reduced to 294 ships and 1,986,121 tons. For all its age and fame, Alang is still unable to deal with the really immense ships—the 60–80,000 formers—and workers in Bangladesh are now working underwater in conditions even worse than Alang.
In Ajay’s manner—part pride, part defensiveness—it is possible to read a much broader local ambivalence. Alang has been condemned by the outside world as a source of shame, and yet it is the major employer in this area: ship-breaking in India generally is calculated to support over half a million workers either directly or indirectly. Ajay and the ship-breakers fear what I or anyone else is going to see and write about Alang, but at the same time the local hotel cites it as a sightseeing attraction and one of the prime sources of local pride. Both Ajay and Mr Patel are heavily involved in the shipyard: Mr Patel is one of the site contractors, repairing and dismantling electrical equipment. Ajay’s role is more complex. He has his own ship-breaking plot, but he also acts as an unofficial spokesman and as a broker between different interests. Though Ajay is keen to advertise Alang’s reputation as the oldest, largest and best of the Asian yards, and declares that ‘Alang never stops,’ he admits in more reflective moments that a 10 per cent profit margin is no margin at all, and—in his own attempts at diversification through the website and publicity—that he himself can see the day when he too will move on.
Ajay stops the car by one of the larger plots, gets out and motions for us to follow. Stepping out of the air-conditioned cool of the car, the smell hits us like a physical force. That smell tells us all we could possibly want to know about this place. Whatever it’s made up of—oil, rubber, burning plastics, dioxins, petrol, stuff no-one wants to think about—it’s a bad, thick, messed-up smell. There is no breeze to disperse it, so the smell and the darkness just hang immobile in the midday heat. A thick grey smirr of pollution hangs over the bay, as tangible as the ships themselves. As we walk towards the entrance of the plot, one of the staff moves towards us, motioning to Ajay to get back in the car and go. After a brief argument we are allowed to stay for an uncomfortable five minutes, peering down a narrow field of vision at a ship, a field of steel plates, a hut at which workers were queuing for fresh LPG canisters, the oil-black sea, and the concrete base of a new staff office spiked with reinforcing rods made—appositely enough—from recycled Alang steel. Ajay points to the yellow safety helmets the cutters are wearing. ‘Safety,’ he says as we watch a man in flip-flops and a filthy dhoti slicing into a 15-foot section of hull, ‘very important at Alang.’ The sparks from the man’s torch cascade over the steel, and the little white light of the flame creeps closer to the edge. We watch, mesmerised. After a couple of minutes, Ajay turns and hustles us back to the car. We drive off at speed, back through the entrance gates and up the road to Bhavnagar.
The next day, I ask if it is possible to go back again. Two hours of strained diplomatic manoeuvring follows. ‘I am sorry,’ I say, meaning it. ‘I know it is difficult,’ Ajay looks away. ‘Later,’ he says, ‘later maybe.’ Then, hopefully, ‘You are wanting see other things? Mountains, sadhus, temple, tiger, luxury beach resort, shopping?’ ‘No,’ I say. ‘Alang. Only Alang.’ Ajay fidgets with his mobile. ‘Yes,’ he says. It is a flexible ‘yes’, containing several different meanings, one of which is ‘no’. ‘You go hotel now.’ I go back to the hotel and start washing my hair, not hopeful of my chances. But in the late afternoon, he is there, standing by his car. This time, it is dusk by the time we arrive. Perhaps this is the best time to see it—the lights of the welding torches firing brightly against the silhouettes of the tankers, the winches and cranes fingering the horizon, the black ectoplasmic line of pollution hanging above the bay in exactly the same place as it had been the day before. A small fire burns at the side of one plot, a tiny flame outlined by the darkness of the surrounding sand.
We stand at the end and look back down the way we have come. Around us are smaller plots where the ships being broken are puny things by Alang standards—4,000-ton customs vessels and 3,000-ton fishing trawlers. Beyond them is the skeletal remains of a 20,000-ton cargo carrier which had arrived intact three months previously and is now no more than bones. Parts of the hull are poking up out of the water and a latticework of winch ropes strain to keep what remains of the hull upright.
It is now, staring at all this infernal beauty, that I start to wonder about ships and their souls. Did these ships have a lifespan, and
if so, is this where they died? Certainly the majority of vessels here are pretty decrepit. Most are the emphysemic old folk of the shipping world, leaky and brittle-boned. The majority of them were never designed to live beyond thirty and have probably been kept alive this long as much through wish-fulfilment and judicious bribery as through adequate maintenance. Looking at the dirty skeletons lined out all the way down the beach it is difficult to feel any particular affection for them; Alang hardly qualifies as a yard full of Fighting Temeraires. But still, when these ships were driven up the sand by their captains and their lights went off for the last time, did anything else depart in that final decisive instant?
Lloyd’s of London’s recent announcement that they would no longer be referring to ships as ‘she’, but ‘it’ implies that a fishing trawler or supertanker is no more capable of possessing a character than a road or an airbus. But most skippers would disagree. Captains once went down with their ships, a tradition built as much on the unbounded loyalty the vessels themselves commanded as the practical difficulties of doing otherwise. More than any other form of transport, ships are floating homes, places where people live and work for months at a time. And if it is possible to attribute a personality to a house—bleak, cosy, welcoming, cold—then it should not seem surprising that people also anthropomorphise the vessels which hold so many lives between their unreliable rivets. Floating in the middle of a featureless sea, crews had no choice but to make a friend or an enemy of the ship which carried them. Though apparently unmourned, each vessel which ends up on the beach at Alang still has a history, a youth, a set of individual whims. I turn to Ajay. Does he ever get emotional about his work? A sharp, unguarded laugh. ‘No!’ Never? He shrugs. ‘Ships like all other thing. They live, they die, some part is for used again. Alang is like vulture, for taking away of bones. It is cycle of life, same with all other thing.’ He pauses. ‘It is exciting.’