The violent explosion on Iranian tanker T.T. Dana was caused by a pocket of gasoline and gasoline fumes, and it had fatal consequences for the people on board the ship. Even though the ship was completely still, 16 people were killed and up to 50 people injured.

But it was not so much the scope of the accident that got the media’s attention, it was more the fact that T.T. Dana was located on a sandy beach in Asia at the time of the explosion, as the aging tanker had been sailed onto the shore of Chittagong in Bangladesh on that day in 2000, when a welding iron broke through the rusty hull. Like ants on a cadaver, an army of local workers were taking the ship apart, throwing the bits and pieces into the brown waters below, from where the debris was carried away on primitive boats to be sold as scrap.