I am reliably told that in Bhopal, women lost their unborn children as they ran, their wombs spontaneously opening in bloody abortion.
Today I have Bhopal on my mind.
And to think about it, I could have concerned myself with the murder by jitney earlier this week.
Or for that matter, I could have contorted my mind in the direction of trying to think and write something or the other about some of the legal consequences some Bahamians can face if they decide to have sex with animals, idiots and children.
But none of this for me, I am so busy with some other matters that matter that I have decided to remind you of something that you may not have known.
Today I have Bhopal on my mind.
But before I get to Bhopal, please be reminded that this day -like all others that have ever been- commemorates something or other that happened on this date sometime ago in the long ago years.
Put it this way, human kind is precisely what it is in God’s ordering of the universe because it has the twinned capacity of remembering this and recognizing that.
So, since I am today tired, I will take an easy way out in the borrowed lines that follow.
These have to do with a matter that some of the masters of the universe would have you not know. But since I am convinced that it is always better to live in the light of knowledge rather than in the dark glow of ignorance, I remind you of a tragedy that continues to fester.
Today I have Bhopal on my mind.
On the night of Dec. 2nd and 3rd, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate.
None of the six safety systems designed to contain such a leak were operational, allowing the gas to spread throughout the city of Bhopal.
Half a million people were exposed to the gas and 20,000 have died to date as a result of their exposure. More than 120,000 people still suffer from ailments caused by the accident and the subsequent pollution at the plant site.
These ailments include blindness, extreme difficulty in breathing, and gynecological disorders. The site has never been properly cleaned up and it continues to poison the residents of Bhopal.
In 1999, local groundwater and well water testing near the site of the accident revealed mercury at levels between 20,000 and 6 million times those expected.
Cancer and brain-damage- and birth-defect-causing chemicals were found in the water; trichloroethene, a chemical that has been shown to impair fetal development, was found at levels 50 times higher than EPA safety limits.
Testing published in a 2002 report revealed poisons such as dichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead and mercury in the breast milk of nursing women.
On 3rd December 1984, poison gas leaked from a Union Carbide factory, killing thousands. How many thousands, 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. Such body counts become meaningless when you know that the dying has never stopped.
The Union Carbide factory in Bhopal seemed doomed almost from the start. The company built the pesticide factory there in the 1970s, thinking that India represented a huge untapped market for its pest control products.
However sales never met the company’s expectations; Indian farmers, struggling to cope with droughts and floods, didn’t have the money to buy Union Carbide’s pesticides.
The plant, which never reached its full capacity, proved to be a losing venture and ceased active production in the early 1980s.
However vast quantities of dangerous chemicals remained; three tanks continued to hold over 60 tons of methyl isocyanate, or MIC for short.
Although MIC is a particularly reactive and deadly gas, the Union Carbide plant’s elaborate safety system was allowed to fall into disrepair.
The management’s reasoning seemed to be that since the plant had ceased all production, no threat remained. Every safety system that had been installed to prevent a leak of MIC — at least six in all — ultimately proved inoperative.
Regular maintenance had fallen into such disrepair that on the night of December 2nd, when an employee was flushing a corroded pipe, multiple stopcocks failed and allowed water to flow freely into the largest tank of MIC.
Exposure to this water soon led to an uncontrolled reaction; the tank was blown out of its concrete sarcophagus and spewed a deadly cloud of MIC, hydrogen cyanide, mono methyl amine and other chemicals that hugged the ground. Blown by the prevailing winds, this cloud settled over much of Bhopal.
Soon thereafter, people began to die.
Remembers Aziza Sultan, 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.
Another survivor, Champa Devi Shukla, remembers that, "It felt like somebody had filled our bodies up with red chillies, our eyes tears coming out, noses were watering, we had froth in our mouths. 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. Somebody was running this way and somebody was running that way, some people were just running in their underclothes. People were only concerned as to how they would save their lives so they just ran.
"Those who fell were not picked up by any body, 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."
And as reported by the Bhopal Medical Appeal in 1994:
"…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 died 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. Families were whirled apart…
"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. Urine and feces ran down their legs. Women lost their unborn children as they ran, their wombs spontaneously opening in bloody abortion."
According to Rashida Bi, a survivor who lost five gas-exposed family members to cancers, those who escaped with their lives "are the unlucky ones; the lucky ones are those who died on that night."
Until the day I die, I will have Bhopal on my mind.
When you find the time, you too should put Bhopal on your mind. As for sex with animals, children and idiots, thou shalt not.
