Chittagong Ship Breaking Yard
Chittagong Ship Breaking Yard, located in Bangladesh, is world's second-largest ship breaking area. The ship breaking takes place in the Fauzdarhat area along the 18 kilometres (11 mi) Sitakunda coastal strip, 20 kilometres (12 mi) north-west of Chittagong.
It accounts for around a fifth of the worlds ship-breaking industry, employs over 200,000 Bangladeshis and accounts for half of all the steel in Bangladesh.[1]
History
In 1960, after a severe cyclone, the Greek ship M D Alpine was stranded on the shores of Sitakunda, Chittagong. It could not be refloated and so remained there for several years. In 1965, Chittagong Steel House bought the ship and had it scrapped. It took years to scrap the vessel, but the work gave birth to the industry in Bangladesh.
During the Bangladesh Liberation War, a Pakistani ship Al Abbas was damaged by bombing. Later on, the ship was salvaged by a Soviet team who were working at Chittagong port at the time and the ship was brought to the Fauzdarhat seashore. A local company, Karnafully Metal Works Ltd bought it as scrap in 1974 and introduced commercial ship breaking in the country.
The industry grew steadily through the 1980s and, by the middle of 1990s, the country ranked number two in the world by tonnage scrapped. In 2008 there were 26 shipbreaking yards in the area and in 2009 there were 40.[2] From 2004 to 2008, the area was the largest ship breaking yard in the world.
References
- ^ "Ship breaking in Bangladesh: Hard to break up". The Economist. 2012-10-27. Retrieved 2013-05-15.
- ^ Sarraf et al., p. 30
External links
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