Gas spewing danger at Sitakunda yard
Last week, in a minor Chernobyll fashion, a gas chamber blasted at a ship-breaking yard at Sitakunda, causing highly injurious toxic gas to float in the air and terminating the lives of a number of workers, of many poultry fowls, and generally impacting people's vision and spreading all sorts of skin itching. A Star report carried an in-depth coverage of the incident and held the security lax responsible for the accident. Over 30 ship-breaking yards are located at Sitakunda beachhead, employing about 2,00,000 workers. None of these ship-breaking bases, however, are adequately equipped with accident-prevention devices; though, many of them have at their disposal very sophisticated ship-breaking instrument. The accident is actually an index of how dangerously life is being lived in and around Sitakunda. A ship for grounding is bought at Tk. 20,000 per 1000 tonnes, which comes to Chittagong to be dismantled, with, presumably, having all its gas cylinders and chambers already exhausted. Sometimes some gas residue may yet be found, which needs to be taken out through extreme caution. Herein fails our local technology. What they try to do is simply engage the local unskilled labourers to handle the gas tubes and open them in their own peculiar method. It's like playing with a live bomb. It's like a Tokai toying with a cracker transformed from a betel-leaf can that he has found in a dustbin. A Star photo shows exactly that: Some workers squatting over a gas-tube in the very workshop where the disaster had occurred only a few days ago. They obviously were trying to find out how the chamber leaked. But, to the readers' plain eyes what appeared as disturbingly inappropriate is that such live gas tubes can't be handled in that manner, engaging common workers. Every body knows that human lives are cheaper in our society by the dozen. So, the way our local buses dump people like fish inside their bellies, the way our launches ply in the raging waves of the Meghna overloaded by two to three times, the way our beggars and homeless people spend their lives in the city streets under the open sky, is the same way in which labourers are given to work at the Sitakunda ship-breaking yard. They are Guinea pigs, not human workers. They live in high risk, food for death.
Moreover, the workers engaged are mostly males, living at the sites, away from families, in abject tenements. The question naturally occurs about how they live everyday, what they eat, and what they do after their work at the yard. Nowadays, demographic studies show that population and environment are interrelated. Sitakunda yard must be the subject now for a fuller study on the workers living at the yard. When their working conditions can be known, then it would be possible to create a high-security anti-accident protective cordon. The oxymoronic irony of all this is that the Sitakunda Echo Park is situated just opposite the ship-breaking yard.
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