| "All Hell Has Broken Loose Here…" |
[10 Jan 2004|12:03pm] |
An extract from “It Was Five Past Midnight In Bhopal” , a book by Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy:
(This is the hospital scene after the gas leak)
In a matter of minutes the emergency department of Hamidia Hospital, Bhopal’s largest medical facility, looked like a morgue. The two doctors on duty, Deepak Gandhe and Mohammed Sheikh, had thought they were going to have a quiet night after Sister Fecility’s visit. All at once the department was invaded. People were dropping like flies. Their bodies lay strewn about the wards, corridors, offices, verandas and the approaches of the building. The admissions nurse closed her register. How could she begin to get down the names of so many people? The little information the doctor could glean confirmed that the refugees came from the localities close to the Carbide factory. So all of them had been poisoned by some toxic agent. But which one? While Sheikh and a nurse tried to revive the weakest with oxygen masks, Gandhe picked up the telephone. He wanted to speak to his colleague Loya, Carbide’s official doctor in Bhopal. He was the only one who could suggest an effective antidote to the gas these dying people had inhaled. After much persistence, he eventually got hold of him towards two in the morning. “That was the first time I heard the cruel name of methyl isocyanate”, Dr. Gandhe was to say. But Dr Loya turned out to be most reassuring.
“It’s not a deadly gas,” he claimed,”just irritating, a sort of tear gas.”
“You are joking! My hospital’s overrun with people dying like flies.”………….
This was only the beginning of his night of horror. Quite apart from hemorrhaging of the lungs and cataclysmic suffocation, he found himself confronted with symptoms that were unfamiliar to him: cyanosis of the fingers and toes, spasms in the esophagus and intestines, attacks of blindness, muscular convulsions, fevers and sweating so intense that victims wanted to tear off their clothes. Worst of all was the incalculable number of living dead making for the hospital as if it were a lifeboat in a shipwreck. Going out briefly into the street to asses the situation, Gandhe saw screaming youngsters clinging to their mothers’ burkhas, men who had apparently gone mad, tearing about in all directions, rolling on the ground, dragging themselves along on their hands and kness in the hope of getting to the hospital…….
They decided to rally all the medical students asleep in their hostel behind the Medical College, after celebrating in Shyam Babu’s restaurant. “On you feet, kids!” he cried. “Don’t waste time getting dresses! Come just as you are, but come quickly! Thousands of people are going to die if you don’t get there in time.”…..
One of them bent over a child being suffocated by the gaseous vapours. Without any hesitation, he applied his mouth to the child’s and breathed air from his own lungs into him for long minutes. But when the medical student stood up, Deepak Gandhe saw him turn suddenly livid and stagger. In snatching the child from death, he had inhaled the toxic gas from his lungs. It was he who was to die.
You can see the photos of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy here
An analysis on the tragedy here
"A Mercy For The Martyrs" - An article by Dominique Lapierre
However, to get the clear picture of the happenings and who all were responsible and who gained and who lost, do read the book. Eventhough the exact number of deaths is not known, reports show something between 16,000 and 30,000. It was not a total loss for all....because some politicians gained a lot from this....and even went on to win the elections.
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