3rd December 1984:
Shortly after midnight poison gas leaked from a factory in Bhopal, India, owned by the Union Carbide Corporation. There was no warning, none of the plant’s safety systems were working. In the city people were sleeping. They woke in darkness to the sound of screams with the gases burning their eyes, noses and mouths. They began retching and coughing up froth streaked with blood. Whole neighbourhoods fled in panic, some were trampled, others convulsed and fell dead. People lost control of their bowels and bladders as they ran. Within hours thousands of dead bodies lay in the streets. From bhopal.net.
This is not a story from a book, this is reality. Today it is the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal tragedy. Human greed caused the death of 20,000 people and serious health problems to more than 120,000 people. It is not correct to report only the numbers, each of them was a single different human just like you (try to count them in your mind one by one). Read the book “Five Past Midnight in Bhopal : The Epic Story of the World’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster” by Javier Moro and Dominique Lapierre) and do something (being sad for one second and saying “this is bad”, you know, is probably not enough).
