The Gadani incident

There is never a good time or place to have a large-scale industrial accident but if there is a worst-case scenario in Pakistan it is an accident at the ship-breaking yards in Gadani. It is the second-largest ship-breaking yard in the world. The Gadani yards stretch about 10 kilometres along a stretch of coast with a hostile terrain to the rear and poor road connections to the nearest large habitation of Gadani town for which they are named. Currently they employ around 6,000 workers directly with at least the same number employed as ancillaries. Accidents are common. Ship-breaking is a dangerous job, made more so in this instance by the remoteness of the location and the poor facilities, particularly medical and emergency services.

The accident that occurred on Tuesday 1^st November killed 14 people and injured 59 others. Both these figures are likely to rise and an unknown number of people are reported as ‘missing’. It was caused by an exploding gas cylinder that was powering equipment in the hulk of an oil tanker and was large enough to hurl debris two kilometres. Expressions of grief and sorrow have come from official quarters but they are largely meaningless unless they are accompanied by action in terms of raising safety standards in an industry that is reputed to be even more dangerous than mining. Regulation and inspection of safety standards is invisible if it is there at all, and images of the operations at Gadani available on the Internet show a workforce that is completely without any kind of personal safety equipment including the most basic such as a hard helmet.

Reliable reports on the latest accident support the anecdotal evidence — workers have no leather safety shoes, fire extinguishers, protective gloves or overalls and above all else no medical services based within the yards to provide immediate assistance whatever the scale of injury or accident. The Gadani yards are a commercial operation providing much needed jobs in an area that is impoverished — which does not excuse those making a profit from their responsibilities to a vulnerable, indeed exploited, workforce.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 3^rd, 2016.

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