More than 40 years later, Indian authorities have begun to remove hundreds of tons of toxic waste from the country’s worst industrial disaster, which occurred in December 1984 in the city of Bhopal.
For decades, people in the area attributed the high level of illness to groundwater contamination caused by the release of toxic gas from the Union Carbide factory on December 2, 1984.
Around 3,500 people died immediately after the chemical accident, but the global death toll is estimated at up to 25,000 people.
As reported by the country’s authorities, a dozen trucks escorted by the police transported the 337 tons of waste, isolated in containers, to a waste center 225 kilometers away on Wednesday night.
“The convoy was reinforced with the highest security protocol ever seen in the transportation of industrial waste in the country,” the director of the local gas relief and rehabilitation department, Swatantra Kumar Singh, told the Times of India newspaper. The waste will undergo “scientific disposal treatment” through incineration.
Image of tragedy
In 1984, 27 tons of methyl isocyanate, a compound used in the production of pesticides, spread across the city of two million people after the concrete cover of one of the storage tanks broke.
The Madhya Pradesh state high court in December ordered the cleanup of the waste within a month.
Causes of malformations
Samples taken in groundwater near the site revealed the presence of carcinogenic chemicals that cause congenital malformations at levels 50 times higher than those accepted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Communities in the area blame the accident and the resulting pollution for a wide range of health problems such as cerebral palsy, speech and hearing deficiencies, and other disabilities.
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