This week in history: November 30-December 6
25 years: Thousands die from poison gas in Bhopal, India
Unknown victim of the Bhopal disaster
On the morning of December 3, 1984, hundreds of thousands of residents of Bhopal, India, wake up with a burning sensation in their lungs and eyes. Panicked, many run from their homes into an enormous cloud of poisonous gas that has seeped out of a nearby chemical plant, owned by the US corporation Union Carbide.
As many as 8,000 Bhopal residents die within 72 hours, and more than 500,000 are exposed to the deadly compound methyl isocyanate. Many experience gruesome deaths, the result of the chemical attacking soft body tissue. Others are trampled by fellow residents fleeing affected neighborhoods in this city of one million, the capital of Madhya Pradesh. Many more are made blind or permanently injured by the poison.
In the years leading up to the disaster, Union Carbide had been warned by experts of the danger of a chemical reaction posed by suspect chemical storage methods. The governments in New Delhi and Bhopal, for their part, had taken no serious measures against Union Carbide, and disregarded the dangers posed by the location of a large chemical factory in a crowded urban area.