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(Appeal text in brown, comment, links thus)
If I think what terror is, to me it’s waking in darkness to the sound of screaming.
The poison gas struck without warning. The alarm siren that should have sounded when gas began pouring from Union Carbide's factory had been turned off. Other safety systems either were out of operation or simply did not work on the night. For a fuller account of the safety failures and what happened on that night, check this.
My eyes and mouth are on fire. In the half light the room is filled with a white cloud. The children are coughing. From outside come yells, doors banging, people shouting 'Run! Run!' The pain in my chest is awful. Not knowing what’s happened, I shout to my wife to grab our children and run.
Survivors' accounts are all remarkably similar. They tell of waking with eyes, noses and throats burning. Methyl-isocyanate, the main gas that leaked from Union Carbide's factory, reacts violently with water, so it first attacked moist mucous tissue. This is also why it did such terrible damage to people's lungs. See the survivors' testimonies recorded on this website.
Outside,
it’s panic. People are running, some this way, some that. Some are
in their underclothes, others in nothing whatever, all just running for
their lives. Someone shouts ‘The Union Carbide factory has exploded!’
We’re caught in a crowd rushing like a river through narrow gullies.
The few street lamps are burning a kind of brown in the gas cloud. I can
make out that leaves on a tree have gone withered black and are falling.
People too are falling, and climbing and scrambling over each other. Cows
are running, trying to save themselves and crushing people. Those who
fall are not picked up, they get trampled over and over again by hundreds
running over them. In the rush our children's hands are torn from ours.
They are gone. We scream their names.
The chemical gas is thick and burning. It’s blinding me. I’m
gasping for breath but this makes it worse. I can’t breathe, froth
is coming from my mouth. I’m half blind. In the gully there are open
drains and people are washing their eyes in the sewage water to ease the
pain. Around me people begin dying in the most hideous ways. Some have
piss and shit running down their legs. Others are gargling blood. Their
lung are bleeding. They’re drowning in their own blood.
It was commonly believed that people had drowned in their own blood because they were frothing red at the mouth and their gurgling fluid-filled lungs left them unable to breathe. They did drown, not in blood but in lymph secreted by the lung linings as they were ravaged by the gas. The scarlet frothing from their mouths came from rupturing blood vessels with the violence of their coughing, as they struggled in vain to breathe. Phosgene, one of the ingredients of methyl-isocyanate, was a chemical weapon in World War I and soldiers who breathed it did in fact drown in their own blood. Phosgene was not so much a military weapon as a terror agent. These lines by Wilfred Owen about a soldier who could not get his gas mask on in time, clearly show the extreme horror of dying this way. The gas victims in Bhopal did not have masks.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
Wilfred Owen "Dulce Et Decorum Est"
A woman I know lost her unborn baby, as she ran her womb opened and the foetus fell out, right there in the street
Check Aziza's story. She lost her baby while fleeing in panic with her two young children. It happened at the Bhopal Talkies crossroads.
Next morning I am frantically searching the heaps of dead for my family. There’s a man burying his baby with his bare hands, praying his other children will live.
On the morning after the night of terror, press photographers Raghu Rai and Pablo Bartholomew came upon this man, burying his baby daughter. As Raghu relates, the father had covered the child's head with earth, then, unable to bear the thought of never seeing her again, brushed away the dirt for one last look. The photographers too were crying. The terrible but tender picture of the child's burial has become the most famous icon of the Bhopal disaster.
As days pass, we’re hit by fevers, aching limbs, breathlessness,
damaged eyes, giddiness, nausea. We don’t know if we’ll live
or die. The Government doctors say they don’t know how to treat us.
Union Carbide which killed our children won’t give us medical information
about the gas. They say it’s a ‘trade secret’.
A factsheet on the issue prepared by International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal"The only available information was held by Union Carbide. They knew - and possibly know more now - about what MIC does in the acute and the chronic phase. They know what it does to the lungs, to the eyes, to the brain, to the reproductive cycle and other systems. They know that by withholding information, they are prolonging the suffering they began, compounding the injuries they originally caused."
Read the account of what happened when a Bhopal protester met two of Union Carbide's top executives and confronted them on this issue.
Bhopal activist Sathyu Sarangi along with two others had been arrested for distributing a factsheet on Bhopal at the company's Annual General Meeting.
He was in jail in Houston, Texas when Union Carbide's PR chief Bob Berzok came visiting in the middle of the night.
On a subsequent visit to the US, Sarangi met Union Carbide Vice President Joseph Geoghen. He asked Union Carbide to release the medical information it held on the effects of MIC (methyl iso-cyanate)
Union Carbide holds the results of at least fifteen separate test studies carried out on animals to determine the medical consequences of methyl-isocyanate exposure. The company refused to share its knowledge with doctors in Bhopal, because to do so would infringe its trade secret. However, when residents of Institute, West Virginia became alarmed because they were living in the shadow of a Union Carbide plant making MIC (methyl-isocyanate),the gas that leaked in Bhopal, Union Carbide released medical information to them.
Nineteen years later,despite constant requests from doctors and health professionals in Bhopal including our own Sambhavna Clinic, the information has still not been released.
Not only is the company's refusal to give the information to Bhopali doctors morally indefensible, it flouts the rules of the American Chemical Manufacturers Association, which state that medical information relevant to a toxic release must be given to treating physicians, and specifically forbides the plea of 'trade secret' in such cases.
Click on the picture above for the full CMA document of which this is an extract. Caution large PDF file, 1.5mb
Even while refusing to provide this information, Carbide interfered with treatment being given in Bhopal, to the detriment of the victims. Injections of sodium thiosulphate were proving beneficial to many victims, but Carbide's toxicologists put out a statement saying that sodium thiosulphate should not be used. The success of sodium thiosulphate could have indicated cyanide poisoning (Hydrogen cyanide is one of the by-products of the methyl-isocyanate reaction that led to the disaster) and many people assumed that the company feared the word 'cyanide'. In fact methyl-isocyanate is 500 times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide and the real reason for suppressing the use of sodium thiosulphate was that its efficacy proved Carbide's poisons had crossed the blood-brain barrier, a fact which had far reaching medical consequences and could have exposed the company to huge compensation claims.As a result of the discontinuation of sodium thiosulphate treatment, countless lives were lost that could have been saved. These deaths were in effect knowingly caused by the company.
Now comes a new terror. We are sick, breathless, unable to work. Everyone is asking, brother, how will we survive? I used to carry heavy sacks on my back, now I can barely carry myself. There’s no help for the poor. My family will starve. It tears my heart. When the gas came everything fell, and everything fell through our fingers. Before, I was poor. Afterwards, I was a beggar.
Nanko, the old man whose picture is featured in this appeal, used to earn a comfortable if meagre living for his family. When the gas came, it left him unable to work. He was destituted and became a beggar. Nanko is now 77 years old. He is often to be seen in the DIG Bungalow area, which is not very far from Sambhavna. He was photographed there by Raghu Rai in 2002.
Months go by. Still we are ill. I would rather not talk about the ‘Carbide babies’ but I’m here to tell what terror is. It is desperate women, scared to give birth, bringing urine samples to hospital begging to be tested. What is wrong with us? Why are so many of our children being born dead? Why are the heads so small, the flesh like greenish-blue jelly, with eyes that stare like boiled eggs?
Read this article about Bhopal's horrifying births.
Sunder Bai was six months pregnant when the gas leaked. She already had two healthy sons. The night of the gas she suffered burning in the lungs and eyes, froth came from her mouth. the baby was born dead after eight and a half months. It had a very small head, was greenish blue in colour and its flesh had become gelatinous. A year later she had a miscarriage. A year after that she had another. Her youngest child, a baby girl was born six and a half years after THAT NIGHT and lived one and a half months. The day she died she threw up froth through her nose and her stool was dark red. In 1993 Sundar Bai gave birth to a daughter, Guriya, now eight years old. A very beautiful child when we met her in April 2002, she was healthy until nine months ago. Now she too is showing all too familiar symptoms: constant fevers, body aches, breathing problems, chest pains and so on. She is now a dull counterfeit of the bright faced gamine we met last year.
Sundar Bai says, ‘Diseases have got stuck to us like insects drinking our blood.’ Her neighbour remarks, ‘There is a prophecy in the Quran that men will drink the blood of men. It is being proven true in Bhopal.’
A dozen years pass. People don’t get better. Union Carbide still refuses to give the medical information. We are frightened, not knowing what will happen to us. Around 8,000 people died in the first days, but the deaths have never stopped. At least one more dies every day. More die and more.
One of the peculiarities of media reporting about the Bhopal disaster is the constantly fluctuating death toll. Journalists seem to fix on whatever figure they like, no two articles or reports are the same. Part of the reason for this is that the death toll in the city was far higher than has ever been admitted officially. The journalists know this but do not know how much higher, so they play safe and the result is chaos. But it also reflects the stunning lack of interest shown by the authorities. No major studies have been completed on the long term health of survivors and while even the official figure for deaths directly attributable to exposure now stands at higher than 20,000, the true figure is probably nearer 50,000. The Bhopal Medical Appeal and the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal give figures of 8,000 killed on 'that night' and dying in the first week, more than half a million injured (560,000 personal injury claims were filed) and between 120,000 and 150,000 still chronically ill and in need of constant medical care. Here is an article showing how we arrive at these figures.
Many
girls who were babies, or born around the night of gas, find their menses
do not come. Others bleed once in three months, or three times a month.
Poor kids, they suffer in silence because such things are not talked about.
If they cannot have children who will marry them?
More time goes. Now there’s a new and baffling horror. Why are people
who were not in Bhopal on that night getting ill with the same symptoms
as the gas victims? Why do they too have the cough and chest pains, skin
rashes and blisters and sores that won’t heal? Why do they get dizzy,
why are they always breathless? We find out the answer. Poison has seeped
into our drinking wells. There’s poison in the ground where we graze
our goats and cows. These poisons come from the same place the gas leaked
from. It’s Union Carbide’s factory. The place is abandoned but
those people left without clearing it. Chemicals lie there in heaps in
the open air.
The pile of reddish brown 'rocks' under the rotting Sevin production unit is actually lumps of carbaryl, the pesticide made from methyl-isocyanate. If it should catch light (and there have been two major grass fires in the site) it would release deadly MIC gas.
It seems the rains washed them deep into the soil and into our wells. We’ve been filling our pots and jugs with poison. The water tastes horrible. It burns our tongues and throats. The water-poisons will collect in our bodies like the gas-poisons already have. They can cause cancers and birth defects. They’re in our blood. They’re in our breast milk. The women weep because they’ve suckled their babies with poison.
French author Dominique Lapierre ("Five Past Midnight in Bhopal") describes what it was like to drink a glass of water from an area near the factory. "I recently wanted to reckon the aggressiveness of this pollution by drinking half a glass of the water of one of those wells. My mouth, my throat, my tongue instantly got on fire, while my arms and legs suffered an immediate skin rash. This was the simple manifestation of what men, women and children have to endure daily." Read the full article here.
Last year lawyers told us that Union Carbide knew for ten years about the soil and water in the factory being poisoned. Knowing the danger to us they kept quiet. They kept quiet even though we were the same people they’d gassed before, whose health they’d already ruined. They did not clean their factory. Once again they valued money more than our lives.
Bhopal.Net report on Carbide's 'Poison Papers', secret Carbide documents obtained in November 2002 via the discovery process during the ongoing class action suit in New York (caution, since the Bhopal.Net site has recently moved servers, some links may be broken, please bear with us while we fix these)
Here is our article on the chemicals found in various studies.
Here is the January 2002 report that mercury, lead and organochlorines had been found in the breast milk of mothers living near the factory. (Word document)
We’re told that if those chemicals catch fire, the same gas will escape that so far has taken more than 20,000 lives. But Union Carbide refuses to clean the place. Well, no one can make it. It’s a big American company, part of an even bigger American company called Dow Chemical. Some people from Bhopal went to Dow’s office in Mumbai taking samples of poisoned water and soil. Dow promised to do something for them. It did. It took out lawsuits saying they’d disrupted its business for an hour and demanded compensation of 300 times what those people earned in a year.
What justice for the poor? Eleven years ago our Bhopal court summoned Union Carbide to face criminal charges of homicide. It refused to show up. It’s still refusing. Who can force it? Its owner Dow is a big friend of the American government and military. So those who brought terror on us have never been punished.
Union Carbide often claims that there are no criminal charges outstanding against it and that it has satisfied all the requirements of Indian courts. It persists in these lies (the company's chief PRO John Musser calls it "mis-speaking") despite the fact that Union Carbide together with its ex-CEO Warren Anderson are wanted criminals in India. The odd thing is that Carbide's parent company, Dow, is carrying on business as normal in India (which includes marketing as safe the pesticide Dursban which is banned for domestic use in the USA) and claims it has no responsibility for the actions of its subsidiary, despite being 100% owner of that company. But however trickily corporate lawyers might be able to word takeover documents, Dow may ultimately be forced to shoulder the responsibility it should voluntarily have assumed See this Bhopal.Net story below.
CBI WILL MOVE FOR DOW TO STAND TRIAL AS ACCUSED NUMBER #10
BHOPAL, 18 OCTOBER 2002
We heard today from C. Sahay, prosecuting counsel for the CBI (Criminal Bureau of Investigation) that his client wants Dow Chemical Corporation to join its wholly owned subsidiary Union Carbide in the dock at the Central Criminal Court, Bhopal. Carbide, along with its ex-CEO Warren Anderson is accused of "culpable homicide" for its part in events leading to the leak of toxic gas which killed thousands on the night of 3rd December 1984 in Bhopal. Both Carbide (Accused #10) and Anderson (Accused #1) have been ignoring the summonses of the Court since 1992 and have been declared official "absconders from justice".
Dow Chemical, said Mr Sahay, is the 100% owner of Union Carbide Corporation and on this basis the CBI will seek permission from the Union government to name Dow alongside its criminally absconding subsidiary. Once permission is granted, Dow Chemicals will also be an accused in the case.
Under Indian law, as under US, UK and European law, a company which buys another company acquires not only its assets, but also its oustanding debts, liabilities and legal obligations. Dow Chemical has already accepted Carbide's asbestos liabilities in the United States. It has so far refused to accept Carbide's Bhopal liabilities on the grounds that all civil and criminal liabilities were extinguished by the 1989 settlement between Union Carbide and the then Indian Government of Rajiv Gandhi. Dow seems unable to remember or perhaps to grasp that the settlement was modified by the Indian Supreme Court's decision of 1991, specifically reviving the criminal charges - the same criminal charges from which Union Carbide and Anderson have been hiding ever since.
The move to name Dow as accused in the case came in response to the plea of Jai Prakash of Bhopal Gas Peedit Sangharsh Sahayoga Samiti, a survivor's organisation. Dow management in the United States should reflect that they were warned, both by survivors' groups and by their own shareholders, that buying Carbide would inevitably mean assuming liability for Bhopal and that Dow's assets in India would then come under threat. (Carbide's assets have long since been attached by the Court.)
Champa Devi spoke for all the survivor's organisations when she emphatically rejected Dow's disingenuous offer of a "humanitarian gesture" and told Dow Europe's CEO Respini in Switzerland yesterday that the corporation had no option but to accept its legal liabilities.* *
In 1994 a man from Bhopal came to Britain to tell whoever would listen about the plight of the gas survivors. They had realised they must help themselves, because nobody else was going to. The survivors wanted to open their own clinic to provide free treatment to gas victims. They wanted the clinic to combine modern medicine with yoga and ayurvedic herbal therapy. The survivors were joined in the UK by people who put the Bhopal Medical Appeal together. Those people were in turn joined by readers of this paper whose response was so generous that we were able to buy a building, recruit doctors and other staff and open the Sambhavna Clinic.
To date we have given free care to over 12,000 people. We employ thirty staff, roughly half of whom are gas survivors. We have pioneered effective treatments based on the principle of using fewer rather than more drugs. We educate local people about the dangers of drinking contaminated water and have helped them to fight for a clean water supply.
Our work has won a string of humanitarian awards, but as the suffering in Bhopal enters its 20th year, We have to do a lot more, a lot more quickly - one person is still dying every day.
Will you join us in our work? We’ve bought two acres in the heart of the worst-affected communities to build a larger clinic and a medicinal herb garden. With four more doctors we could almost treble the number of people we treat. You can help in many ways (details on www.bhopal.org) but most instantly useful is money, which goes a very long way in Bhopal. It’s hard to believe but a little over £1,000 will pay a doctor’s salary for a year. So please be as generous as you can - the smallest amounts are manna to us. The people in Bhopal send you greetings. Nanko (pictured) says to tell you that he and the dog are fine and send you their salaams.
You will find plenty of information about Sambhavna and its work on this website. For an up to date account of the Clinic's work and plans, please read our October 2003 newsletter.
You are quite possibly here because you responded to our appeal in The Guardian. Now that you have read the appeal and the facts behind it, please help with a donation so that we can keep providing free medical care to the victims of the gas and water poisoning in Bhopal.
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