Of the six killed, two are muakadams (labour contractors) and four are workers. There casualty is expected to be higher because there were many workers engaged in dismantling when the ship caught fire.
Alang coast has a tidal range of around 13 meters, making it easier to beach a condemned vessel directly onto the shoreline. This plot is one of some 130 plots that are in use today. Till June 1983 the Alang beach was pristine, it is now severely polluted by the hazardous waste material of dying ships from industrialised countries.
In the meanwhile, the Supreme Court's decision on the matter of shipbreaking and hazardous waste and whether or not the US ship Platinum II (MV Oceanic, SS Independence) that is lying illegally anchored at Bhavnagar Anchorage Point has been delayed, creating an atmosphere of non-regulation of ship-breaking activity. Sources have informed that the permission to dismantle the US ship at its anchorage point itself appears to have been given.
Rampant corruption and acts of omission and commission of the Gujarat Maritime Board (GMB) is evident in the manner which the report of the channel blockage due to Platinum II was sent to Union Environment Ministry. As of today the ship breaking plots at Alang in Gujarat has about 166 ships to dismantle. In the 2009 about 260 ships were recycled, several dozen ships came to Alang in the aftermath of the arrival of Platinum II.
A Central Technical Team constituted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), Government Of India (GOI) had assessed the hazardous materials/wastes contained in the ship, including Poly-Chlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs), Asbestos and radioactive substances and on November 9, 2009, disallowed beaching and recycling of the ship at Alang for violating the US Toxics Substances Control Act. Ship owners Global Shipping LLC and its affiliated company Global Marketing Systems, Inc. were fined a total of $518,500 for this and the fact that they reached India using fake documents.
Despite the above order, thr Directorate General of Shipping has not sent the ship back. In the face of such routine fires, oil spill and fake documents, the silence of the Ministry is shocking. It is because of such criminal dereliction of duty on the part of the officials from the Ministry of Shipping that, over the years, Alang has been turned into not only the graveyard of ships but also of workers. The ship breakers' yards stretch a full seven miles along the coastline of the Indian state of Gujarat, which has been contaminated with oil spill, hazardous wastes and micro-organisms due to the connivance of the Ministry of Shipping.
In the second week of March 2010 too, one of the four persons who were injured in a fire that broke out in a ship while it was being dismantled at plot number 123 of Alang ship breaking yard has died. In the minutes of the meeting of the Inter-ministerial Committee (IMC) on ship breaking held on March 4, 2009 under the Chairmanship of B.S. Meena, Additional Secretary and Financial Adviser (AS&FA), Ministry of Steel, it is noted that the Coast Guard representative and the Naval HQ representative had "expressed apprehensions that the vessels coming in for beaching sometimes ply very close to the oil rigs, which could be a potential for accidents." The IMC must revise its position in the light of these accidents.
Earlier, six labourers were burnt alive in an engine room at Alang ship breaking yard on August 4, 2009 on plot no. 24 in the morning. Workers from Alang Auto & General Engineering Co. (P) Ltd were cutting down the engine portion of ship ‘M S Jesica'. On June 1, 2009 on Plot 15, Ayodhyasingh Rajput died in an accident. A second fatal accident took place in Plot 24 D in May, 2009.
Such things happen in a routine manner in Alang. Union Environment Secretary headed Supreme Court-appointed committee in its report has revealed that the fatal accident rate in Alang is in the range of 2 per 1000 as opposed to 0.34 per 1000 in the mining industry (which is considered the worst in the industrial sector). The industrial activity must be taken off the Alang beach to protect these dying workers and the coastal environment. The currently practiced “beaching method" whereby obsolete ships are run aground on ocean beaches for cutting and breaking apart in the intertidal zone can never be accomplished in a manner which is environmentally sound or protective of human health.
No amount of prescriptive improvements or protections can remedy the four fatal characteristics of intertidal beaching operations required in the ship-breaking activity. Firstly, it is not possible to contain pollutants on a tidal beach where hulls of ships are often breached accidentally or by cutting, or toxic paints erode or are abraded sending persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals and oils onto the beach and into the seawater; Secondly, due to a shifting and soft wet tidal sand surface, it is not possible for emergency response equipment, including fire-fighting equipment and vehicles, ambulances to enter the area. Thirdly, it is not feasible to allow cranes to work alongside to lift heavy cut sections of a ship and thereby preventing heavy cut sections from being subject to gravity, shifting or falling directly into workers or into the water and finally, there is the absolute incompatibility of conducting hazardous waste management operations in the ecologically delicate and vital coastal zone.
For more details contact Gopal Krishna, Toxics Watch Alliance.
Tel: 9818089660, E-mail: krishna2777@gmail.comÂ
www.toxicswatch.com, imowatch.blogspot.com
