December 9, 2004
Bhopal Marks Anniversary with Candlelight Vigil
Reuters

It was midnight when gas began to leak from a Bhopal factory and killed thousands as they slept in central India 20 years ago. At midnight Thursday, some 100 survivors held a candlelight vigil to remember the night that changed their lives.

By Sugita Katyal

BHOPAL, India (Reuters) - It was midnight when gas began to leak from a Bhopal factory and killed thousands as they slept in central India 20 years ago.

At midnight Thursday, some 100 survivors held a candlelight vigil to remember the night that changed their lives.

Sitting outside the shuttered plant holding photographs of loved ones who died when nearly 40 tonnes of highly toxic methyl isocyanate escaped from a pesticide plant on the night of Dec 2, 1984, the protesters wept quietly.

"My hair stands on end every year at midnight on this day," Rashida Bi said during the vigil. Bi lost six members of her family to cancer after the gas leak. She suffers from chronic breathlessness.

"It was like the end of the world. Those who died that night were lucky. The survivors are the unlucky ones. We have to eat kilos of medicines to keep going," she said, standing near a gray statue of a mother and child that remembers victims.

Rashida Bi is not alone.

Two decades after one of the world's worst industrial accidents struck Bhopal, a city of lakes and mosques, thousands exposed to the deadly gas complain life is an endless battle with fading vision, breathlessness, joint pains, irregular menstrual cycles, depression, cancer and tuberculosis.

Activists say nearly 20,000 people are forced to drink groundwater that is poisoned because tonnes of toxic chemicals at the factory have been seeping into the soil.

"The water we drink is completely brackish," shouted Sakina Bi, who lives in a sprawling slum opposite the abandoned plant, then owned by Union Carbide, now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Co.

"My daughter almost spends half the month in hospital because she often can't breathe. She has had three miscarriages"

Union Carbide accepted moral responsibility for the tragedy and established a $100 million charitable trust fund to build a hospital for victims, said Tomm Sprick of the Union Carbide Information Center. Union Carbide India Ltd. began cleanup work at the site after the incident, spending some $2 million.

The government took over the site in 1998 and assumed further responsibility for clean-up operations.

"MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE"

Activists say nearly 8,000 tonnes of toxins including carcinogens such as trichloral ethylene, benzene hexachloride and mercury have been found in groundwater near the factory, a cluster of about five blackened sheds with rusty pipes and cylinders standing amid acres of tall grass.

Barely a few yards from the disintegrating tank that spewed the noxious fumes stands a crumbling warehouse with splitting sacks of foul-smelling gray powder, some marked poison.

"Another 10,000 tonnes of toxic chemicals are in a pond where the factory used to dump effluents," said activist Abdul Jabbar.

More than 3,500 died soon after the leak and authorities say at least 15,000 people have died in the past 20 years. Activists put the number at nearer 33,000.

While thousands of poor and illiterate survivors living near the factory are oblivious of the toxins, they do know that life is a constant struggle for survival.

Amna Bi, who lost her husband and three-year-old son in the gas disaster, said her lungs had weakened and she had high blood pressure.

"I can't even work to make a living because it's difficult for me to stand for too long," she said. "Over the years, I've had to spend so much money on my treatment."

Many say the trauma just won't go away.

"When we ran out after a whistle went off a bit after midnight, it seemed like someone had thrown a bomb. Nothing can make up for the loss of my husband and two children," wept Chironji Bai Thakur.

The government of Madhya Pradesh state, of which Bhopal is the capital, acknowledges the groundwater is polluted, and has ordered a survey to look at disposal methods.

"Twenty years is much too long for the human suffering that has gone unattended and the large evasion of responsibility by global corporations," said Ward Morehouse, a rights activist.

"There's been a complete miscarriage of justice."

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