Where do supertankers go when they die?

February 18, 2006 3:04 PM

The Chittagong ship-breaking yards in Bangladesh disassemble half of the world's supertankers. Shipbreaking, though profitable, is not particularly safe for either the workers in the shipyard or the surrounding environment. It does, however, make for some spectacular pictures. Also, pinpoint the location of the shipyard and explore via satellite with Google Earth.
posted by monju_bosatsu (54 comments total)

Thanks for this post, monju.

Steel scavenging on the beach...the industrial age equivalent of gleaners...
posted by darkstar at 3:30 PM on February 18, 2006

There is this too.
posted by roguescout at 3:40 PM on February 18, 2006

a large part of Sebastio Salgado's WORKERS book was photographed at this location, too.
posted by virga at 3:44 PM on February 18, 2006

Prior Burtynsky / shipbreaking threads here and here. I've been using a couple of these as wallpaper recently.
posted by dhartung at 3:47 PM on February 18, 2006

If only we were so focused on salvaging/reclaiming everything in this manner.

By dusky-skinned poor people on the other side of the world of course.
posted by sourwookie at 3:56 PM on February 18, 2006

Here it is on Google Maps, for those who don't have or don't want to bother with Google Earth.
posted by mendel at 4:02 PM on February 18, 2006

If you find this interesting, I strongly recommend The Outlaw Sea by William Langewiesche. It contains a gripping account of his visit to a ship breaking facility in India (as well as some other VERY interesting stuff about international shipping).
posted by popechunk at 4:14 PM on February 18, 2006

Amazing. Thanks!
posted by brundlefly at 4:18 PM on February 18, 2006

Great post.
posted by Hankins at 4:25 PM on February 18, 2006

Greenpeace has had some success against this. The Clemenceau, a French aircraft carrier laden with asbestos and PCBs, is headed back to France for decontamination prior to its demolition in India.
posted by caddis at 5:01 PM on February 18, 2006

For all its hazards, the shipbreaking industry employs, directly or indirectly, an estimated 200,000 Bangladeshis.... The scrap metal stripped off these vessels supplies 80 percent of Bangladesh's steel.

Fascinating, mb. Oh, and speaking of recycling, ya'll remember that fighter that crashed last month attempting to land on the USS Ronald Reagan off the Queensland coast? Apparently, the Navy left a few things behind — plane included.
posted by rob511 at 5:03 PM on February 18, 2006

i have always wanted to get my hands on two of these things lash them (or whatever) together and start my own floating nation, i figure we could put a couple big ass wind turbines on the top, grow our food on the top two layers, and have enough space for a couple thousand people, we would park it out in the middle of the ocean....but thats just me.
posted by stilgar at 5:38 PM on February 18, 2006

Fantastic post.
posted by Ritchie at 5:38 PM on February 18, 2006

Good stuff.
posted by Tullius at 5:48 PM on February 18, 2006

Where do supertankers go when they die?

They might just break up and fade away all by themselves:

In December 2000, the Castor, carrying 8.7 million gallons of unleaded gasoline across the Mediterranean, developed cracks in its deck and had to be drained of its cargo in a risky ship-to-ship maneuver.

Preliminary findings in the Castor case rocked the industry. According to the American Bureau of Shipping, the classification society that certified the vessel, the Castor had fallen prey to "hyper-accelerated corrosion" - swiftly dubbed "super-rust" in the trade press. The ABS downgraded its assessment to "excessive corrosion" in its final report, issued this past October. Nonetheless, that document noted that the vessel's steel had disintegrated at rates of up to 0.71 millimeter a year - more than seven times the "nominal" rate expected by the bureau.
...
Super-rust was initially explained as an unprecedented phenomenon, a highly evolved form of corrosion neither foreseeable nor preventable. The truth is less mysterious: Hyper-accelerated corrosion is the inevitable result when unforgiving chemistry meets the harsh economics and tangled industry politics of transporting fossil fuels.

According to an April 2001 press release by the American Bureau of Shipping, corrosion in some areas on the Castor was fifteen times the expected rate:

The 600 tons of steel, primarily in the deck plating and underdeck longitudinals, that was renewed on the Castor at Special Survey in late 1997 has provided the key to understanding what transpired in the interim.

"Although further testing is still being undertaken, our gaugings indicate that sections of this steel have already wasted by as much as 30 percent," said Iarossi. "This indicates an annual corrosion rate of as much as 1.5mm compared to normal rates of about 0.1mm or less."

The critical element, according to the preliminary findings, is the presence, and absence of coatings.

What happened to the Castor is not unique. The sorry state of tanker design, construction, maintenance, and inspection standards are detailed in the 2006 book The Tanker Tromedy — The Impending Disasters in Tankers (PDF, open source license):

The tanker being built today is flimsy, highly unreliable, unmaneuverable, and nearly impossible to maintain. And the situation is becoming progressively worse. As a result, we will have gargantuan spills in the future that need not have happened. This book outlines the sad history of tanker regulation and calls for fundamental changes in both tanker design and the regulatory system.

More details about the Castor incident—including international issues about places of refuge for ships in distress—are in Chapter 2-12.
posted by cenoxo at 5:50 PM on February 18, 2006

Thanks for the Google maps link, mendel. Great post, monju.
posted by bright cold day at 5:55 PM on February 18, 2006

i have always wanted to get my hands on two of these things lash them (or whatever) together and start my own floating nation, i figure we could put a couple big ass wind turbines on the top, grow our food on the top two layers, and have enough space for a couple thousand people, we would park it out in the middle of the ocean....but thats just me.

After reading Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, I've wanted to buy my own container ship :P
posted by delmoi at 6:24 PM on February 18, 2006

Excellent post, and stilgar... fine idea. I will grow gills. Beautiful, beautiful gills.
posted by Football Bat at 6:25 PM on February 18, 2006

Great post, and beautiful ghostly images.
posted by pardonyou? at 6:29 PM on February 18, 2006

stilgar - I'd soooo be there with you. Got $16 million lying around somwhere?

In addition to growing plants (greenhouse/hydroponic), there's always the bounty of the sea available (or would growing shrimp and catfish in huge tanks be more efficient?).

We'd need weapons, though. Pirates and their ilk, you know.

Although if you started taking on refugees and infecting them with a mind virus religion, all bets are off.
posted by PurplePorpoise at 6:42 PM on February 18, 2006

OK so i always thought i was the only one, maybe we can start some sort of of net-club where we all put in 1000 bucks and thats like a "citizens fee" and when enough people sign up wallah we go buy one and start this shit up. i like where you are going purple, but i am a vegetarian so i never figured on eating the fish...the mind virus thing is great however. we would need our own army of zombie's to repel pirates. these super tankers are like 50 stories high, i doubt we would have much trouble from your run of the mill pirates, we would have to worry about like other nations military more i think. your normal pirate rides in a speed boat, we could in effect ignore them until they went away. i am sorta semi serious about this maybe i will set up a web space for like minded individuals to help set this up. and hash out all the particulars.
posted by stilgar at 6:48 PM on February 18, 2006

stilgar, I recommend recruiting some of these people.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 6:51 PM on February 18, 2006

"i have always wanted to get my hands on two of these things lash them (or whatever) together and start my own floating nation"

stilgar?


posted by mr_crash_davis at 6:55 PM on February 18, 2006

Pirates and their ilk, you know.

You mean smokers?
posted by cenoxo at 6:58 PM on February 18, 2006

Despite the commercials, insurance companies are not in the business of reducing risk. A zero risk world would put them out of business. They love risk; they just want to be sure of the odds, so they can set the premia profitably

Cenoxo ,in these days of lip service, these few lines and the correct use of the word premium in latin soooooo much sold me the book you linked in pdf ! Excellent find and thanks for sharing it !
posted by elpapacito at 6:58 PM on February 18, 2006

Elpapacito, as most underwriters might say, there's no great gain without some loss.
posted by cenoxo at 7:02 PM on February 18, 2006

"i have always wanted to get my hands on two of these things lash them (or whatever) together and start my own floating nation"

I call #4 top oar!

delmoi can be timesman and Football Bat will occasionally beat me with the end of a rope.
posted by Ritchie at 7:05 PM on February 18, 2006

We keep you alive to serve this ship, so row well and live...

posted by cenoxo at 7:11 PM on February 18, 2006

heh - no I was thinking more real-life high seas pirates and L. Bob Rife and Snowcrash from Stephenson's novel Snowcrash (as in, you start doing that crap, I'm leaving).

As for weapons, I guess a mixture of sonic weaponry (couldn't find a link to the cruiseship repelling pirates) and deck mounted conventional machine guns ought to do the trick.

Fuel would be a problem (ongoing costs of operation) unless it was nuclear powered (then it'd mostly be a one-time cost). I've read about turbine generators attached to kites so they can be lifted up to the jetstream of generate electricity 24/7 so maybe something like that coupled with next-tech sails might do the trick (can't find the article, but it was about supertanker-sized ships that were wind powered - moving goods from Asia to NAmeria and back).

We might have to buy/rent a satalite for internet connectivity, though. If we bought, we might be able to host metafilter on the high seas?
posted by PurplePorpoise at 7:49 PM on February 18, 2006

Powerful post monju_bosatsu. Thank you. The photographs by Brendan Corr and Michael Reichmann are amazing. Astounding fact about the scrap metal from this ship-breaking providing Bangladesh with 80% of its steel.
posted by nickyskye at 8:11 PM on February 18, 2006

Could we obtain Letters of Marque against Scientologist vessels?
posted by Ritchie at 8:12 PM on February 18, 2006

If we bought, we might be able to host metafilter on the high seas.

The MeFi Amigo renamed, rebuilt, refloated, and re-purposed porpoised?
posted by cenoxo at 8:25 PM on February 18, 2006

I don't know what you guys are talking about now, but this thread used to be about shipbreaking, and you can find videos of it here:
Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers >>click on the Surplus 1 movie to see shipbreakin set to electronic beats.

the whole sequence with the shipbreaking people in it (at the end of the movie, not in the clip) is rather poignant, and haunting.
posted by eustatic at 8:36 PM on February 18, 2006

Wow - fantastic post. Love to see BD on the front page, thanks.
posted by jamesonandwater at 8:45 PM on February 18, 2006

i figure the whole thing would be solar and wind powered, and by that i mean there are several football fields worth of space on the tops of these things several very large wind turbines and a half acre of solar panel off the sides on racks, then on the sides we would install wave capture devices to harvest that energy...all clean, all renewable, all free, shit we could even let scientists do fancy research out there and charge them for it...as well as tourists to our nation..shit we could be making money hand over fist, our main national export could be electric container ships that "dock" with the mother ship to fuel up on some clean renewable energy from our wind farm, we would be able to charge less because we had lower fuel costs, and then of course when we get our permanent airship regatta that floats our space elevator up into low earth orbit so we can start colonizing the asteroid belt....i am going to stop now. sorry to thread jack, the original post was very very good.
posted by stilgar at 8:48 PM on February 18, 2006

Fuel would be a problem (ongoing costs of operation) unless it was nuclear powered (then it'd mostly be a one-time cost). I've read about turbine generators attached to kites so they can be lifted up to the jetstream of generate electricity 24/7 so maybe something like that coupled with next-tech sails might do the trick

Regular old sails should work just as well today as they did 200 years ago. If you're shipping cargo, obviously, it's more cost effective to use oil then anything else.

Rather then a technical fix, what about an economic one? Just ship cargo back and forth on your boats, and use the money to buy oil and food for your people.
posted by delmoi at 8:54 PM on February 18, 2006

Stilgar: I doubt you could get energy cheaper then market rates. If hydrogen were cheaper then oil, people would be using it.
posted by delmoi at 8:57 PM on February 18, 2006

i would use electrical motors and sails with build in solar cells and wind turbines to recharge battery banks...it would be more expensive to build (a lot more expensive) but the "fuel" aka electricity would be "free", mostly because it is almost always windy and or sunny on the ocean, plus like i said i would capture wave energy as well...it would be much cheaper than oil, just really really expensive to build, so it would be probably like 10-30 years before it paid itself off(assuming the cost of oil kept going up), but if people were going to be living on it, we could make leisurely trips around the world trading for a living...kind of romantic. just a dream of mine.
posted by stilgar at 9:04 PM on February 18, 2006

The Langewiesche piece popechunk is referring to is The Shipbreakers and originally appeared in the August 2000 Atlantic Monthly (definitely worth a read).

1998 Pulitzer Prize winning series by the Baltimore Sun on Shipbreaking.
posted by mlis at 9:08 PM on February 18, 2006

There was an interview with William Langewiesche on NPR the other day. I guess the French are trying to get rid of an aircraft carrier filled with asbestos or something...
posted by ph00dz at 9:22 PM on February 18, 2006

and then you would sink because your ships have super-rust and you blithely think ships don't need to be, you know, maintained or anything.
posted by keswick at 9:31 PM on February 18, 2006

keswick what i got from the reading is that the nasty stuff in the boats, nd their poor design was what was causing the "super rust"
posted by stilgar at 9:35 PM on February 18, 2006

PurplePorpoise: suggestions for defense here, here, and here.
posted by Ryvar at 9:35 PM on February 18, 2006

Re MLIS' reference to Langewiesche's Atlantic Monthly article about Alang, India, The Shipbreakers points out the strong cultural differences about shipbreaking's environmental problems:

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.

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. 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. Resentful Indians kept saying to me, "You had your industrial revolution, and so we should have ours." I kept suggesting in return that history is not so symmetrical. But of course they knew that already, and viewed Alang with more complexity than they could express to me, and were using a simplified argument they felt I might understand.

On the ship-scrapping beach at Chittagong, in Bangladesh, I met an angry man who took the simplest approach. He said, "You are sitting on top of the World Trade Center, sniffing fresh air, and talking about it. You don't know anything."

He was angry about the West's presumptuousness and its strength. He was angry about people like Claire Tielens, at Greenpeace. When I talked to Tielens in Amsterdam, she was unyielding about Greenpeace's demands. She said, "Ships should not be scrapped in Asia unless they are decontaminated and they don't contain toxic materials. New ships should be built in such a way that they can be scrapped safely -- so without hazardous materials if possible. The export of toxin-containing ships from Western countries to developing countries should be stopped. And if possible, ships should be cleaned throughout their lifetime. If they export clean steel, that's fine with us."

I said, "But ships will always contain toxic wastes. Is it economically possible to ..."

"'Economically'? Well, of course that's a very flexible term."

And that flexibility depends largely on the size of one's personal economy, yes?
posted by cenoxo at 9:44 PM on February 18, 2006

Yet more links in this MonkeyFilter thread I came across while looking for this CBC documentary that introduced me to shipbreaking. Is February 'Shipbreaking Awareness Month' or something?
posted by unmake at 10:25 PM on February 18, 2006

As for weapons

...they'll always listen to Reason.
posted by beth at 12:47 AM on February 19, 2006

Beth:

will you marry me?
posted by sourwookie at 12:49 AM on February 19, 2006

Make sure she installed the new patch, sourwookie.
posted by PurplePorpoise at 9:35 AM on February 19, 2006

I recorded The Shipbreakers when it aired on Discovery Times Channel a year back or so. Visually stunning show that reminded me much of some scenes in Powaqqatsi.

If anyone is interested I could torrent a copy of it (if I knew how to do that)...
posted by thrakintosh at 11:40 AM on February 19, 2006

...if it was legal, of course.
posted by thrakintosh at 11:44 AM on February 19, 2006

Weird. I remember reading about a place like this in Wired a few years ago, and I was telling my girlfriend about them just yesterday.

Now I'm going to eat some jumbo shrimp.
posted by drezdn at 4:17 PM on February 19, 2006

More pics from Burtynsky, as well.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 5:08 PM on February 20, 2006

And yet more Burtynsky.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 11:01 AM on February 21, 2006

More Chittagong photography from Sebastiao Salgado.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 7:39 AM on February 24, 2006