Windsor Morning7:14Father and son now living in Canada reflect on how Bhopal disaster disrupted their lives 40 years ago
Saroj Bhattacharjee, 81, calls it the “biggest trauma” of his life.
Now living in Edmonton and still working as an engineer in the oil and gas industry, Bhattacharjee was a maintenance engineer at Union Carbide in Bhopal, India, in 1984 when the toxic gas methyl isocyanate leaked from a storage tank. It’s estimated roughly 36 tonnes of the fumes spewed into the city’s air from the pesticide plant on Dec. 2 and 3.
The leak eventually led to the deaths of thousands of people. Over half a million people suffered injuries, with thousands sustaining severe or permanently disabling harm. Long term, some people became blind or contracted cancer.
Bhattacharjee said neighbours in Bhopal initially alerted him at night about the leak.
“[They] pounded on our door just to ask what to do. What has happened? I told them that, ‘Just go inside your house … close all the windows, all of the air entries into the house.'”
The next morning, said Bhattacharjee, he drove close to the plant and saw images he wishes he hadn’t seen, and that will stay with him forever.
“People were running around … vomiting. People were coughing, and then I thought, ‘OK, let me go to the nearby hospital.’ Dead bodies are all wrapped in white clothes and laid on the ground.”
Bhattacharjee’s son, Shuvo, who now lives in Windsor, Ont., was 11 at the time of the leak.
Shuvo remembers it was a normal night at first.
“We could smell the gas. After that, it was a little bit of a blur because you could see there was a road in front of our house that connected out of the city of Bhopal to another town nearby, and the road was full of people walking in silence, riding trucks, riding cars, whatever they could find. They were just leaving.”
In 2010, seven former senior employees of Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary were convicted of death by negligence for their roles in the Bhopal gas tragedy.
Saroj said his younger son, Shamik, who also lives in Edmonton, was quite affected by the incident.
“I didn’t know how. Maybe he came out to see what is happening outside. He had a problem of respiratory trouble for quite some time.”
According to Saroj, it’s history that should not be repeated.
“These are avoidable things, not the natural calamity, which we have very little control. This is purely man-made negligence, organizational disinterest, and the main motto of making profit at the cost of safety for the employees, for the people surrounding the community. That is preventable.”
Shuvo said there are also lessoned to be learned from the gas leak disaster.
“Such incidents teach us that no matter how good you make a system, something can always go wrong, and we should never play that down. From a technical perspective, from a risk perspective, that stays the same.”
Shuvo said marking such tragedies is important, especially in diverse countries such as Canada.
“We are such an international country that even a little city like Bhopal, which probably most Canadians have never heard of, has a connection to us in Canada.”
