Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, December 3, 1994 TAG: 9412060017
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DILIP GANGULY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BHOPAL, INDIA LENGTH: Medium
It was as if someone had turned the already wretched slum into a gas chamber, unleashing a toxic brew that doomed thousands of people in a matter of hours by making them gulp the air that killed them.
Tens of thousands of people crawled or ran, panic-stricken, from their homes that miserable night in Bhopal 10 years ago, victims of a lethal gas leak from a subsidiary of U.S.-based Union Carbide.
Hazara Bee was one of the survivors of the world's worst industrial disaster.
``Everyone was fleeing. I ran and ran and fainted. When I regained consciousness, I remember someone asking me if my husband's name was Abdul Latif,'' Bee, 50, said Friday.
A hospital staffer was trying to identify her. Her husband, Abdul Latif, was already dead - one of 4,000 who died that night. By official count, about 3,000 others died later from illnesses caused by the disaster at the pesticide plant.
That night, hundreds of corpses lay where they fell, their mouths and eyes covered with a white froth formed by the reaction of the poison gas with the oxygen the victims had tried so desperately to breathe in their last minutes.
Most had their mouths open in a last gasp. Street dogs gnawed at the corpses that lay all over the slum, which adjoined the Union Carbide factory - the factory that had employed thousands in Bhopal, then killed them.
A decade after the tragedy, the visible scars have all but faded from Bhopal, an 11th-century city built around two lakes. A parking lot was built on land outside Hamidia Hospital where, 10 years ago, hundreds of bodies were laid out, cardboard name-cards placed at each head. The potholed roads leading to the Union Carbide pesticide factory, where victims lay struggling for breath or blinded, have been repaved.
Once, the plant's tall smokestacks symbolized opportunity. Today, the smokestacks are rusty, and the metal tank that leaked the deadly methyl isocyanate just before midnight Dec. 2, 1984, is smothered with weeds. Union Carbide, whose parent company is based in Danbury, Conn., sold off the last of its Indian holdings this summer.
But though the physical reminders have been erased, pain and poverty still stalk many of the half million survivors in Bhopal.
Many don't like to talk about the tragedy that ruined their lives. For the past 10 years, they have discussed their agony with so many doctors, lawyers, officials and reporters that the exercise of recollection has become an exercise in futility.
The last hope for any redress, monetary compensation, is snarled in a tangle of red tape. At dawn on any day, people line up outside the claims court to complete paperwork for receiving compensation.
The effects of gas poisoning are still claiming victims.
``Our estimate is that 25,000 people have died until now directly or indirectly due to the gas leak,'' said Abdul Jabbar Khan, head of the Bhopal Gas Victims Organization.
In 1989, Union Carbide paid $470 million, one-twelfth of India's original claim, in an out-of-court settlement. About 94,000 compensation claims have been settled and $20 million paid to victims.
by CNB