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Monday, May 26, 2003

By Christopher Snowbeck, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

When poison gas leaked from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, Champa Devi woke to the sound of neighbors screaming: "Run for your lives. You will die staying here."

Rashida Bi and her family tried to flee the city that night, too, but the gas made their eyes feel "like someone was piercing them with needles," she told a group yesterday at Carnegie Mellon University.

The leak of methyl isocyanate gas on Dec. 2, 1984, killed 4,000 people within hours, but the death toll over the years has exceeded 14,000 as those sickened by the gas later died.

The ongoing health, social and economic concerns of Bhopal's survivors prompted the two women to travel to the United States, where earlier this month they staged a protest outside a shareholders meeting for Dow Chemical Co. in New York City. Dow purchased Union Carbide in February 2001.

The women described the Union Carbide horror to a group of more than 100 people gathered at Carnegie Mellon for the national conference of the Association for India's Development, an international group that raises money to fund development projects in India.

Satinath Sarangi of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal accompanied the women yesterday and said Bhopal survivors want Dow Chemical to participate in an ongoing criminal trial in India about the Union Carbide disaster.

Survivors want the company to provide long-term medical care for the 150,000 with chronic health problems related to the accident, Sarangi said. Dow should also pay for the cleanup of contaminated soil and water, said Sarangi, a metallurgical engineer who rushed to Bhopal after hearing about the disaster. He has advocated for victims ever since.

The group met with executives at Dow earlier this month, but a Dow spokesman told the Detroit Free Press that the company insists it is not liable for the spill. A Union Carbide settlement in 1989 that paid $470 million to the Indian government settled all claims, according to Dow.

But the settlement didn't match the suffering, the women said yesterday.

Most people welcomed Union Carbide into Bhopal because the factory meant jobs, said Devi. Before the accident, strange smells came from the plant and some animals died after drinking water from a pool near the factory, she said, but no one guessed at the potential danger.

When Devi, her husband and five children started running on the night of the accident, they found there was nowhere to go. She watched as her children started foaming at the mouth and vomiting. Her husband fell and suffered a stomach injury that Devi believes enabled bladder cancer to kill him 12 years later. After prolonged exposure to the gas, Devi couldn't open her eyes for 10 days.

Bi described similar travails that night. Noting how she saw mothers leave behind their children that night, she commented:

"A storm of death blew over Bhopal."

What's not well known is that the storm still lingers, she added. In the days and weeks after the incident, Bi's search for relatives included an inspection of 900 corpses in a morgue. She has struggled with death and disease in her family ever since. The economy and social structure of Bhopal were also broken during the accident, she said, and those wounds have failed to heal, as well.

"The people who are alive today are perhaps unlucky to have survived because the pain continues," she said.