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WITNESS: A stroll through the factory of death in India's Bhopal
Wed Dec 17, 2008 7:21pm EST
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Alistair Scrutton is chief correspondent in India for Reuters. He joined Reuters in 1998 as a correspondent in Lima, Peru and then worked in Buenos Aires covering Argentina's economic crash. As a regional correspondent, he flew around the continent to cover stories ranging from the rise of Hugo Chavez to civil war in Haiti. In 2004, he moved to Washington as editor for political and general news in Latin America before moving to India in 2007. In the following story, he describes walking through the Bhopal plant in India, 24 years after a toxic gas leak killed at least 8,000 people.
By Alistair Scrutton
BHOPAL, India (Reuters) - First it was an acidic smell, then a slight itching of the throat, a burning sensation as I sucked in the southern Indian air.
This was Bhopal, and history had come to visit.
I was looking for an innocuous pipe, one of a maze that juts out from Bhopal's plant. The leaking pipe still stands, 24 years after it spewed toxic gas into nearby slums, killing at least 8,000 people in one of the world's worst industrial disasters.
In search of that pipe, I had strolled through this plant just outside the city with a government permit in hand, accompanied by a bored-looking policeman and my guide, Sanjay.
By an old rusty tank near one of the plants, I suddenly smelt something acidic, what survivors had told me hit them as clouds of gas drifted over their homes before they started choking, panicking, and going blind.
"It smells like benzene," said the policeman, as if that piece of wisdom would reassure me.
I was later told the odor could be from a chemical used to make Sevin, the pesticide then manufactured at the plant by U.S.-based Union Carbide Corporation.
If ever there was evidence of bureaucratic inertia, legal squabbling, and corporate wrangling, it was that nearly a quarter of a century after the tragedy the smell of untreated chemicals still lingered.
Around midnight on Dec 3, 1984, some other chemicals used to make Sevin accidentally mixed with water and sparked a chain reaction that led to half a million people being poisoned by gas.
Aside from the cobwebs and rust, the plant is much the same as it was in 1984. More than 300 tonnes of waste, left lying around in drums, were only stored in a warehouse in the complex three years ago.
AN ORPHAN
Sanjay guided me. He had survived the tragedy when he was a baby. His parents and five brothers and sisters died. He grew up in an orphanage, and in a story of a life against the odds, has now applied to take a master's business degree.
"The first time I came here I was so scared," he said as we strolled along a dirt path between plant buildings.
"This was the factory that killed thousands of people, my parents . Now I don't mind, I'm used to it." Continued...
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