Photoessay of the Day: End of the Line
This morning, I read a photoessay on Chittagong, a Bangladeshi beach that is one of the world’s longest. It’s not your typical beach: this is where half of the world’s tankers go to die.
When the tide is high, vessels are driven at full speed toward the shore. Once the water recedes and the ships rest along the muddy beach, the salvage crews move in, emptying the vessels of everything on board.
There are some incredible photos in this essay, but the data are equally fascinating and startling:
- The work employs over 200,000 Bangladeshis
- The scrap metal from the scavenged ships provides 80% of Bangladesh’s steel
- Most of the workers working on this toxic, dangerous site with sharp metals and unknown chemicals do so without gloves or shoes
- It is estimated that one worker is killed each day
The economics behind two hundred thousand people making their living handling titanic cast-off detritus is mind-boggling to me. What a huge, strange world we live in.
link: Foreign Policy: End of the Line
(via mental_floss)
There’s a lot more info on this phenomenon known as shipbreaking over at Google Sightseeing.