Bhopal disaster continues to be a plague

BHOPAL, India — Like a phantom, the poison first came on a breeze. When tank No. 610 blew at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in 1984, it unleashed a milky fog that would extinguish more than 15,000 lives in this ancient city.

Two decades later, residents say, a second poisonous onslaught brews underground. Rainwater, they say, has washed an assortment of toxins left at the decaying Union Carbide factory into the groundwater of the same slums, and people drink from tainted wells there.

On a recent afternoon in Atal Ayub Nagar, the worst polluted slum, a circle of women waited their turns to fill plastic jugs at a well, while two grimy boys hunched shin-deep in a tiny black pond and fished out discarded cookies. Several studies have shown the neighborhood’s water to contain a cocktail of poisons such as lead, mercury and organic compounds known to attack the liver, kidney and nervous system.

Inam Ullah, crouching on the porch of his hut, says his body has lost 30 pounds since he moved to the colony 12 years ago. With intestinal pain sapping the strength needed to push his vegetable cart, the frail 50-year-old withdrew his two boys from school and put them to work as day laborers. He thinks it is the water that plagues his stomach and that killed his wife last year.

“My wife has died,” said Mr. Ullah, his dark eyes glassy. “We will die also.”

Bhopal, a city once known for its jungles, glistening lakes and the resplendent Taj-ul-Masjid, one of India’s biggest mosques, is better known now as the city of poison. A generation after history’s deadliest industrial disaster, Bhopal’s slum dwellers say they continue to suffer from the effects of the toxins of Union Carbide, an American firm that is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical Co.

In the years after the gas leak, as Bhopal sought to grasp what had happened, few paid close attention to the toxic mess left at the abandoned factory. Some cleanup was performed — Union Carbide says $2 million was spent on waste removal in the first 10 years after the disaster — yet it remains a seeping industrial sore.

Strewn across the ghastly 90-acre landscape of rusted pipes and crumbled warehouses lie hundreds of tons of pesticides and other poisons stored in open drums and heaps of splitting white sacks.

Two studies by the Madhya Pradesh state government in the 1990s and three more in recent years by independent groups — the most notable conducted by the Greenpeace Research Laboratory at the University of Exeter in Britain — found severe groundwater pollution and attributed it to the Union Carbide plant’s waste.

The company rejects those conclusions.

Spokesman Tom F. Sprick said the Connecticut-based firm trusts instead a 1997 survey by India’s National Environmental Engineering Research Institute that judged the water to be untainted. The company’s own consulting firm, Arthur D. Little, which oversaw the institute’s study, warned, however, that its tests were not comprehensive and that the water may not be safe to drink.

In a door-to-door survey last year of sections surrounding the factory, the gas victim charity Sambhavna Trust found residents stricken by a variety of toxin-related ailments, including anemia, headaches, menstrual disorders and stomach and chest pains, said its director, Satinath Sarangi, who attributed the problems to the toxins. Severe cases included cancer and growth and mental disorders in children, he added.

In India’s many poverty-ridden slums, it is hard to distinguish toxin-induced illnesses from others. But Mohammed ali Qaiser, a doctor at one of Sambhavna’s two clinics, which he said treats about 70 toxin victims daily, says he has little doubt that water pollution is behind much of the sickness.

“The water is obviously contaminated,” said Dr. Qaiser. “People not residing in affected areas are not having these kinds of problems.”

The state government took note of the health hazard in the late 1990s when it began trucking big, black barrels of water into affected slums. The effort, though, proved fitful. Last summer, the state provided less than 10 percent of the amount of water needed to survive, according to a survey by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal.

Story Continues →