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Comment by tropo | Hacker News Reader

The shipbreaking process is pretty strange. It's really labor-intensive. It looks dangerous. It looks like large chunks could even get lost in the beach. Does the company even legitimately own the beach?

Of course, due to labor cost and environmental law and so many other things, we can't replicate that method in a first-world nation. I wonder if we could automate it. I think the ships are mostly just going to be melted down. That should be easy: put a dry dock next to a really big furnace that can consume the whole ship in one go. NOM NOM NOM!

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There is an interesting segment on this in the documentary "Workingman's Death".

https://vimeo.com/88162472 from 1:21:00. The entire film is quite beautifully photographed. Too bad it has not been released in an HD format yet.

Workingman's Death is probably my favorite Michael Glawogger film. It feels less staged and fake than "Megacities".

Atlantic magazine ran some photos of this process. http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/11/the-ship-breakers/1...

It's amazing what sorts of things can happen when strong, dedicated, and intelligent people will work for 250 rupees per day and be happy about it.

To me the amazing thing about this article is that owners can afford to scrap their ships after only a couple of decades in service. I guess nothing's built to last.

It is not so much that they can afford to scrap them as it is that they cannot afford to keep them (though I assume they knew this was coming when they built them.)

Have you been to India? Everything is labor intensive and dangerous. The employers have no liability for workplace deaths because everyone just wants a job.

I don't understand how they get them on the beach. I'd think they'd bottom out well offshore, even at high tide.

I recently got sucked up watching videos of this on YouTube. From what I can tell they just run them at top speed directly onto the beach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kDbwE7mFck

It initially seems like it would be difficult to so comprehensively beach a ship but that impression may be in part due to the fact that normally the ship's crew would be trying to avoid being beached. In other situations when a ship is beached we are seeing a ship that did everything it could to avoid or at least minimize the situation.

Not that surprising really that the outcome is very different if the crew point the ship directly at the beach, try to arrive with as much momentum as possible and keep the engines at full power throughout while ignoring the various bumps and thumps.

In addition, I assume, the ships being beached are empty- no cargo, very little fuel, probably stripped of a lot of normal equipment. They'll have a much shallower draft than a laden ship.

That would make sense. Removing any cargo is a no brainer. It also seems to make sense to have as little fuel as possible and to have already removed any high value equipment that doesn't absolutely need to still be on the ship for its final journey.

All together that means the ship could potentially be significantly lighter than its usual unloaded weight let alone its weight when loaded.

Ships normally carry ballast water when not loaded. All ships are mandated to have double hulls. Ballast and fuel tanks can be located in that space.

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