A toxic shadow still lurking
As blame is traded, the suffering goes on.

By Mike McPhate
For The Inquirer

BHOPAL, India - Like a phantom, the poison first came on a breeze. When Tank 610 blew at the Union Carbide pesticide plant Dec. 3, 1984, it unleashed a milky fog that would extinguish more than 15,000 lives in this ancient forested city.

Two decades later, studies show a second poisonous onslaught brews underground.

PHOTO: ADRIAN FISK

Mohammed Yunus, 38, at his home near the edge of the former Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. "When someone has a cut and puts salt in it - it feels like that," he says of the skin rash, which has turned most of his coffee-colored skin to patchy gray.

The warm rain of 20 monsoon seasons has washed an assortment of toxics left at the decaying Carbide factory into the groundwater of the same slums that bore the brunt of the gas leak, according to government and independent studies. Lawsuits aimed at getting the site cleaned up, and compensation to victims of the contamination, continue to inch through Indian and U.S. courts.

On a recent afternoon in Atal Ayub Nagar, a 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 fished out discarded food. Studies have shown the neighborhood's water contains a mix of such poisons as lead and mercury and volatile organic compounds known to attack the liver, kidney and nervous system.

Inam Ullah, crouching on the porch of his burlap-roofed hut, says his body has shrunk by 30 pounds since he moved to the area 12 years ago. A searing pain in his stomach finally sapped the strength he needed to push his vegetable cart, so the 50-year-old was forced to pull his two boys from school and put them to work as day laborers.

He says he believes it is the water that plagues his stomach and killed his wife last year.

"My wife has died," says Ullah, his dark eyes glassy. "We will die also."

Bhopal, a city of more than one million once famed for its glistening lakes and jungles, as well as the resplendent Taj-ul-Masjid, one of the country's biggest mosques, is better known now as the city of poison.

In the years after the gas leak, as Bhopal sought to grasp its epic toll, few paid close attention to the toxic mess at the abandoned factory. Some cleanup was done - Carbide says $2 million was spent on waste removal in the first 10 years after the disaster - yet it remains today a hulking industrial sore. Strewn among the ghostly, 90-acre landscape of rusted pipes and crumbled warehouses lie hundreds of tons of pesticides and other toxic elements stored in open drums and heaps of splitting, white sacks.

A pair of studies in the 1990s by Bhopal's state government, Madhya Pradesh, and three more in recent years by independent groups - the most notable by the Greenpeace Research Laboratory at Britain's University of Exeter - each found groundwater pollution attributed to the plant's waste.

Amnesty International released a report Monday that accused Union Carbide and its owner, Dow Chemical, of condemning Bhopal's residents to disease. "Local residents are continuing to fall ill from drinking contaminated water," Amnesty spokesman Benedict Southworth said in a statement.

Carbide rejects those conclusions. In an e-mail exchange, spokesman Tomm F. Sprick said the company instead trusted 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 NEERI study, warned 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, Sambhavna Trust, the Bhopal victim charity, found residents stricken by a variety of toxic-related ailments, including anemia, headaches, menstrual disorders, and stomach and chest pain, said the group's director, Satinath Sarangi. Severe cases included cancer and growth and mental disorders in children, he added.

Among India's slums, it is difficult to parse out cases of toxic-induced illnesses from the rest. Mohammed ali-Qaiser, a doctor at one of Sambhavna's two clinics, says he treats about 70 victims daily related to toxic elements; he says he has little doubt that water pollution is behind much of the sickness.

"People not residing in affected areas are not having these kinds of problems," Qaiser said.

The state government took note of the health hazard in the late 1990s, when it began trucking barrels of water into affected slums. But by last summer, the state provided less than 10 percent of the water needed for residents to survive, according to a survey by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal.

"Everyone drinks the [well] water," says Atal Ayub Nagar resident Salma Bee, a mother of seven, describing the taste as bitter. "We have no other choice."

Neither the state of Madhya Pradesh, which owns the factory property, nor Carbide accepts responsibility for the waste cleanup, which would cost an estimated $25 million. Carbide spokesman Sprick wrote in an e-mail that his company's liability ended in 1994 when it severed ties with its Indian subsidiary, Union Carbide India Limited, which had leased the property. State officials hold both of the companies responsible.

"Our view is that polluters should remove damage that has been done," says Iqbal Ahmed, an official with Bhopal's Gas Relief Department.

Many Bhopal activists, including Rachna Dhingra of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, say a pro-industry mind-set among officials in India's capital, New Delhi, has kept them from pursuing accountability from Carbide, whose parent company, Dow, is a top investor in the country.

The head of India's Bhopal response efforts, Ramesh Inder Singh, says the issue has languished so long only because the legal nightmare that followed the disaster - more than a million claims were filed - has kept their offices paralyzed.

This summer, India gave its blessing to a lawsuit under way in New York, brought by Bhopal victims against Carbide, which seeks to compel the company to clean the site and pay damages to victims. The U.S. court had required India's permission to proceed with the case.

Himanshu Rajan Sharma, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said he believed Carbide had judged the lives of poor people in distant countries to be expendable.

"Carbide's handling of the whole Bhopal issue is a travesty," Sharma wrote in an e-mail. "If that disaster or even the subsequent contamination had occurred elsewhere in Europe or the United States, I very much doubt that Union Carbide would have had the temerity to behave with the disregard and contempt that it has shown to the victims in this instance."

Carbide spokesman Sprick, noting the company gave $90 million for a victims' hospital in Bhopal, said critics had ignored its efforts to atone.

"Union Carbide has nothing but the highest respect and compassion for the people of Bhopal," Sprick wrote.

Carbide's relationship with India was forged as part of a noble enterprise: to rescue the agricultural nation from widespread hunger. The factory in Bhopal, an overnight train ride 350 miles south of New Delhi, was opened in 1969 at a time when Indian officials hailed wonder pesticides that they hoped would wipe out the country's crop-hungry insects. Carbide's 600 workers set about brewing 2,500 tons per year of pesticides derived from a blend of chemicals, the most potent of which was methyl isocyanate (MIC).

While the company still blames the gas leak on unnamed saboteurs, Indian investigators have attributed it to a recipe of shoddy supervision and design flaws. All agree, though, that somehow water was introduced into a tank holding 40 tons of MIC, setting off an unstoppable reaction that burst a valve.

In the first minutes of Dec. 3, 1984, the gas slunk like an inkblot through neighboring slums, where families had bundled up for bed in Bhopal, then a city of about 850,000. It devoured their lungs, hearts and brains, killing at least 3,000 that night, with thousands more lingering to their deaths in the weeks and years to follow.

For many survivors, the tainted drinking water simply worsens the misery of ailments left over from the tragedy.

A few blocks from the Carbide factory gates, Mohammed Yunus, 38, removes his shirt to reveal a body consumed by lesions, a condition born when the MIC gas washed over his skin as a teenager. Compared with an old photograph that shows him with a sturdy build, Yunus is gaunt and has difficulty standing.

"When someone has a cut and puts salt in it - it feels like that," he says of the rash, which has turned most of his coffee-colored skin to patchy gray.

Yunus says his compensation payment has run dry and he can no longer afford the cheap antibiotic pills that had once easily suppressed the disease.

Carbide settled all gas-leak claims in 1989 when it paid a lump sum of $470 million in an out-of-court settlement with the Indian government. Yunus, like most of the more than 500,000 successful claimants to the money, received about $550. That amount, though, is expected to grow soon; the Indian Supreme Court recently ordered an additional $345 million to be paid out from the settlement, which has sat for 15 years in government coffers earning interest.

While victims complain that the government accepted too little, Carbide defends the payout on its Web site as "much larger than any previous damage award in India, and $120 million more than plaintiff's lawyers had told U.S. Courts was fair."

No amount of reparations can cap the anger that many survivors aim at Warren Anderson, Carbide's CEO at the time of the disaster. They are galled, they say, that the retiree has never faced judgment.

Sanjay Verma, 21, who lost his parents, three brothers, and two sisters in the gas leak, said the factory's oozing poison was an ongoing insult to survivors.

"It's horrible," he said. "There should be a museum, or a park, something in memory of those who died."

Verma's story is a rare bit of redemption amid Bhopal's tragedy. From the day of the gas leak, when he was only an infant, he has grown into a young man who plans to use his compensation to help earn an accountant's degree.

On a recent afternoon, as the autumn sun dipped low and a nearby muezzin bellowed his mournful call to prayer, Verma took a walk through the factory that vanquished most of his family. With the plant's noxious fumes in his nostrils, he pondered for a moment the thought of confronting Anderson, then said that he would want only to ask: "Don't you realize you have done a crime?"

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