The Death Slog

Today was my EEES paper. A paper of environment and society. In this subject there was a unit named – “Air Pollution”, in which I read about this – “BHOPAL DISASTER “. It was on Dec 3^rd – just a day ago. When we were enjoying our lives with full entertainment, twenty threee years ago this night brought all the darkness it can and swallowed whole Bhopal in it. Twenty three years have gone by since the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. The victims of biggest industrial accident are yet to receive succour. “The Bhopal Gas Tragedy” has been lost in the collective consciousness of the nation. Yes, life has to go on – we must light candles and offer prayers for the victims of this deadly disaster.

I would like to share with you all what happened that feary night:

That night was same as all the december nights. There was nothing special. All people were sleeping in their and those who were not – were crumbling in their blankets on their crouches.
Suddenly around 00:30 hours the trees curled and turned black, birds fall dead out of the sky. This was sign of a definite death ready to grasp ‘Bhopal’ in itself. Death came out of a clear sky. Midnight, a cold wind blowing, the stars brilliant as they are in central India, even through the thin pall of cooking-fire smoke that hung above the city. Here and there, braziers were burning to warm those who were obliged to be out late.

From the factory which so many had learned to fear, a thin plume of white vapor began streaming from a high structure. Caught by the wind, it became a haze and blew downward to mix with smokes coming from somewhere nearer to the ground. A dense fog formed. Nudged by the wind, it rolled across the road and into the alleys on the other side. Here the houses were packed close, ill-built, with badly-fitting doors and windows. Those within were roused in darkness to the sound of screams with the gases already in their eyes, noses and throats. It burned terribly, it felt like fire.

According to a survivor: “At about 12.30 am I woke to the sound of my baby coughing badly. In the half light I saw that the room was filled with a white cloud. I heard a lot of people shouting. They were shouting ‘run, run’. Then I started coughing with each breath seeming as if I was breathing in fire. My eyes were burning.”

Everybody was feeling life as if somebody had filled up their bodies with red chillies. Tears were coming out from all pairs of eyes, every nose was watering, each mouth was filled with froth. The coughing was so bad that people were writhing in pain – some people just got up and ran- in whatever they were wearing or even if they were wearing nothing at all. Everybody was running in this or that direction. Everybody’s only concern was as how they can save their lives, so they were just running.
“Those who fell were not picked up by anybody, they just kept falling, and were trampled on by other people. People climbed and scrambled over each other to save their lives – even cows were running and trying to save their lives and crushing people as they ran.”

In those apocalyptic moments no one knew what was happening. People simply started dying in the most hideous ways. Some vomited uncontrollably, went into convulsions and fell dead. Others choked to death, drowning in their own body fluids. Many were crushed in the stampedes through narrow gullies where street lamps burned a dim brown through clouds of gas. The force of the human torrent wrenched children’s hands from their parents’ grasp. The poison cloud was so dense and searing that people were reduced to near blindness. As they gasped for breath its effects grew ever more suffocating. The gases burned the tissues of their eyes and lungs and attacked their nervous systems. People lost control of their bodies. Women lost their unborn children as they ran, their wombs spontaneously opening in bloody abortion.

When dawn broke over the city, thousands of bodies lay in heaps in the streets. Even far from the factory, the ground was so thick with dead that you could not avoid treading on them. The army dumped hundreds of bodies in the surrounding forests. Families and entire communities were wiped out, leaving no one to identify them. According to that time generation, those who survived the gas are the unlucky ones; the lucky ones are those who died on THAT NIGHT.
How many thousands died, no one knows. Carbide says 3,800. Municipal workers who picked up bodies with their own hands, loading them onto trucks for burial in mass graves or to be burned on mass pyres, reckon they shifted at least 15,000 bodies. Survivors, basing their estimates on the number of shrouds sold in the city, conservatively claim about 8,000 died in the first week. The official death toll to date stands at more than 20,000 and even now, twenty years later, at least one person per day dies in Bhopal from the injuries they sustained on THAT NIGHT.

It all happened due to failure in handling a toxic material in large scale chemical processing and the consequences that have to be faced by a city in short time. It happened when a pesticide manufacturing plant (Union Carbide Factory) released a potent toxicant – methyl isocynate gas (MIC) into the atmosphere due to alleged functional failure of vent scrubber outlet.

This death day could have been escaped if general information would have been provided to workers working with MIC. MIC is a gas which gets neutralized when comes in contact with water forming a harmless product – N-methylalcohol.
For now we can do only one thing just offer prayers to those who left their bodies and get indulged into that only ONE being .