Disaster Response
I was nine years old, living at a remote air base in Assam, India, the night of December 2, 1984, when, some 1,245 miles away in central India, a massive cloud of toxic gas escaped from a plant operated by a US chemical company, Union Carbide. The gas blanketed the sleeping city of Bhopal, killing some 3,800 people in a matter of hours. Another 18,000 or so people would eventually die from the exposure to the poisonous methyl isocyanate gas in the following days, months, and years. News of the calamity, which to this day remains the deadliest industrial disaster in the world, was quick to circle the world, even in those pre-Internet days. We heard of it at the air base too, but since there was no local TV broadcast station or newspaper, the visuals arrived only when Indian Air Force planes shipped in weeks-old newspapers and magazines. I think that’s when I first saw Burial of an Unknown Child, a photo that has become the most iconic image of the disaster. Taken by photographer Raghu Rai, it shows the face of a dead child, eyes open and cloudy from the poison, visible amid the rubble a roughly prepared grave. A hand gently caresses the child’s forehead. (The child’s family was never identified, and Rai says no one ever came forward to claim the photograph.) I’ve been forever haunted by that image. (You may see the photo here, but please keep in mind, it is graphic.) I learned later that children made up a large number of the fatalities because the gas drifted close to the ground. I also learned that the accident was caused by the gross negligence of Union Carbide. But the company, now owned by Dow Chemical, has for decades managed to evade responsibility for the disaster, thanks in part to repeated interventions by the US government. Meanwhile, the contamination, which was never cleaned up, continues to kill and maim Bhopalis to this day. As the 40th anniversary of this horrific tragedy looms, on September 25, a group of survivor-activists from Bhopal are coming to the California Bay Area to meet with local activists and find ways to work together to seek, among other things, the justice that they have been long denied. We should support their search for accountability.
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