Gadani Ship Breaking Yard

The recent reduction in taxes on scrap metal has led to a modest resurgence of output at Gadani, which now employs around 6,000 workers.

[3] Gadani currently has an annual capacity of breaking up to 125 ships of all sizes, including supertankers, with a combined LDT of 1,000,000 tons.

At Gadani, a ship with 5,000 LDT is broken within 30 to 45 days, whereas in India and Bangladesh it takes, on average, more than six months to break a vessel of the same size.

[6] However, increased competition from rival ship-breaking yards in Alang, India, and Chittagong, Bangladesh, coupled with relatively high import duty for decommissioned vessels, led to a disastrous decline in Gadani's output.

[7][8] On 1 November 2016, at least 26-31 workers were killed and 58 wounded as a result of gas cylinder explosions on a ship being scrapped, the floating production storage and offloading oil tanker Aces (IMO number: 8021830, built 1982 as Mobil Flinders),[9][10][11] causing a huge fire.