How to Break Down an Oil Tanker
By: Ralph Deckers
Tags: India, Industry, Travel, Technology, Motorcycle

The safety engineer said “We have just finished cutting one slice and within the next hour or so we are going to pull it down, using the same thick iron metal cable used to drag the ships onto the beach.”

We sat next to the exit of the gate, in front of his office, on plastic chairs. We waited in vain.

The cable stretched over a distance of fifty to sixty yards. Workers from the dockyard had gathered and stood in the vicinity of where the slice would land. The workers stood dangerously close if you had asked me. The safety engineer did not see any potential danger in this.

The cylinder started turning and we could see the cable tightening. Every other few moments the energy it released made another sound which added to the constant iron and metal cacophony. The safety engineer gave orders through his walkie talkie. “Keep going, keep going”, he told the cylinder operator. “A little bit more, a little bit more.”

BANG, a strong noise erupted from the cable. BANG! Another strong noise this time coming from the top of the ship. Something had given way up there. First I thought the cable itself was broken. I deemed it impossible a cable would be able to pull over this huge wall of metal.

For an instant, there was no tension on the cable. Immediately the cable tightened and then gave another strong pull. We all watched how slowly, a wall of iron the size of a cliff, started falling. The orc army started running. The wall started gaining speed. As the wall of metal started accelerating so did our emotions. To let our emotions out we started shouting and cheering. The faster the wall fell the louder our voices became. wooOOH!!!

Please check out the video I shot below

The ground beneath us trembled when the slice hit. The cloud of dust thrust into the air embraced the dockyard. The cloud of dust gradually disappeared and the workers started climbing on top of the slice to start welding. It was like watching ants cooperating to attack a larger insect. The level of human cooperation was unbelievable.

Several minutes and the first part of the slice fell on the ground. It was picked up by the crane which dropped the piece with a bang on a truck. Not much later the piece drove passed us out through the gate through which we entered, leaving no trace but flying dust particles behind.

‘You are lucky,’ the safety engineer had said. After having witnessed this action for two hours, after having been offered a peek into this world behind the barbed wire, walls and fences, we were thrilled and happy by what we had seen. Thus the engineer had been right.

It’s the workers who can not be considered lucky. For me the iron gate spanned over the entrance of Alang is reminiscent of the gate over the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Twenty thousand working men work on the beach of Alang in terrible conditions. Officially slavery is abolished. However in the current global capitalist economic system, it’s still present in a more modern form than the nineteenth-century version.

That same afternoon we drove back to the safe and sound environment of the island of Diu. As we drank our first untaxed beer, we talked about how our newly acquired motorcycle driving skills had been put to the test.

It was however not the motorcycle driving experience that stood out.

The visit to the Isengard of our planet earlier that day was by far the most memorable. In hindsight, we could have just entered through the main gate without a problem.

A shot from the wall blocking the view onto the beach. Picture by Ralph Deckers.

Thank you for reading this article. Ralph Deckers is a Dutch historian. He holds a BA in History and a MA in History of International Relations of the University of Amsterdam. Ralph has studied at the National University of Singapore. He’s been traveling and guiding for years and has explored over 65 countries. Due to the corona crisis his tour leading work evaporated and so he decided to start writing on Medium. He is recognized as a Top travel writer and is a publisher at Noteworthy, Illumination and ONE PIN.