exposure

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The entire shipyard, the mud in the intertidal zone, it's all contaminated. This stuff goes into their lungs, through their skin, onto their fingers. And they ingest it when they eat.

To make it all worse, the workers live close to the shipyards. They get beaten up by the toxins at work, then get more of it at home. Here people live and work in poison. The government says no workers suffer health problems due to the industry, but it hasn't done a single study, not a single worker has been examined.

Many workers die in accidents; explosions, fires, falling objects, fall from height. In Bangladesh, 35 died in one accident. In Alang it has been as high as one a day - 350 a year.

But the official figures underestimate the true level of fatalities because these are nameless migrant workers. Many have come desperate for work from their villages over 2000km away. They are people without identities, just chipping away at the steel; they're extremely vulnerable.

When a worker dies, there's no way his or her family would even know about it for months - until another worker goes back to the village perhaps just once a year.

The business of treating workplace accidents is a growth industry. Near Alang there are many doctors, treating up to 50 injuries a day - crushed fingers, smashed bones, burns. Not life-threatening, but enough to prevent the victim working in the future.

The main culprits who have been dragging their feet are shipowners. They use a ship for 25 or 30 years, and when profits start running low they want to dump it. They don't want to pay any money to make them safe. But shipowners must be made to pay for decontamination, there's no other way lives can be saved.

These shipowners are still hidden behind veils, and these veils need to be removed to expose the faces of these people as responsible for the deaths in Alang."

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