Shipbreaking in Bangladesh

They are almost a quarter of a mile long. Their crews use bikes to get around on them. They can carry over 500,000 tons of oil. A crash stop can take two miles and last 14 minutes. Astronauts can see them from outer space. When they pump their bilge they can leave a wake 93 miles long. There aren't many ports they can fit in, so smaller tankers often sail out to unload their cargo.

Supertankers. And when they are worn out, many are driven aground on a broad, flat beach at Chittagong, Bangladesh, where Bangladeshi workers wade out through the mud at low tide and dismantle them. The Jan/Feb 2006 issue of Foreign Policy Magazine has a compelling photo essay on this process entitled End of the Line by photographer Brenden Corr.

The images are hard to forget, and the shipbreakers of Bangladesh have attracted numerous other photographers. Edward Burtynsky's shipbreaking photography is haunting, as is the work of Jiri Rezac, Rune Larsen, and Sebastiao Salgado.


Links:
About Supertankers
Wikipedia: Supertankers
Photo: Supertanker Bilging
Google Supertanker Satellite Photo
From Wired: Super Rust on Supertankers
Ship Breaking:
Rune Larsen: About Ship Breaking
Greenpeace: Shipbreaking
National Film Board of Canada: Shipbreakers

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ms.dsk adds on 26Mar06,

Here's one of seminal articles on the topic (covering shipbreaking in both Alang and Bangladesh) which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 2000. Be sure to choose the PDF version so you can see the amazing, humbling photographs:

Langewiesche, William. "The Shipbreakers." Atlantic Monthly Aug. 2000: 31-49. Academic Search Premier. EBSCOhost. Hinckley Lib., Northwest Col., Powell, WY. 26 Mar. 2006 ‹http://search.ephost.com/›.