India cleans toxic waste from Bhopal gas leak site 40 years after the disaster. health News
Officials say burning the poison is environmentally safe as activists have raised concerns over potential water pollution.
Indian officials say they have removed hundreds of tons of hazardous waste left behind more than 40 years after the world’s deadliest industrial disaster hit the city of Bhopal.
Waste from the site of the 1984 disaster, which killed more than 25,000 people and caused at least half a million to suffer serious health problems, was sent to a disposal facility where it took three to nine days to be incinerated, officials said Thursday. It will take months. ,
In the early hours of December 3, 1984, methyl isocyanate gas leaked from a pesticide factory owned by the American Union Carbide Corporation, poisoning more than half a million people in Bhopal, the capital of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
More than 40 years later, on Thursday morning, a convoy of trucks transported 337 metric tons of that poison to a waste disposal plant in the industrial town of Pithampur in Madhya Pradesh, 230 km (142 miles) from Bhopal.
Swatantra Kumar Singh, director of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation Department, told Reuters news agency that the waste would be disposed of in an environmentally safe manner with no harm to the local ecosystem.
The federal pollution control agency had run a test for the waste disposal process with 10 metric tons of poison in 2015, which found that the resulting emission levels were in line with national standards, the state government said in a statement.
However, activists claim that after burning the solid waste will be buried in landfills, which will contaminate water and create an environmental problem.
“Why aren’t polluters Union Carbide and Dow Chemical being forced to clean up their toxic waste in Bhopal?”. asked Rachna Dhingra, a Bhopal-based activist who has worked with survivors of the tragedy.
groundwater pollution
Built in 1969, the Union Carbide plant, now owned by Dow Chemical, was seen as a symbol of industrialization in India, creating thousands of jobs for the poor and producing cheap pesticides for millions of farmers .
Disaster struck the factory in 1984 when one of the tanks storing the deadly chemical methyl isocyanate breached its concrete cover, spilling 27 tons of the poisonous gas into the air.
About 3,500 people were killed instantly, out of an estimated 25,000 killed overall. Thousands of people were poisoned, putting them at risk for future cancer, stillbirth, miscarriage, lung and heart disease.
Testing of groundwater near the site in the past revealed that levels of chemicals known to cause cancer and birth defects were 50 times higher than levels considered safe by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Communities blame the accident and groundwater contamination for a host of health problems – including cerebral palsy, hearing and speech impairments, and other disabilities.
The High Court of Madhya Pradesh state had ordered the cleanup of the waste in December, after the 40th anniversary of the disaster, setting a deadline of one month.
“Are you waiting for another tragedy?” Chief Justice Suresh Kumar Kait said, according to a Times of India report.
