Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [108]
“Ratna Nadar Ki Jai! Ratna Nadar Zindabad!” * A rousing ovation in Hindi and Urdu acclaimed the father of the bride and his cartload of delicacies.
“Thank you, friends! Thank you, my friends!” he repeated over and over again as he handed out his little boxes.
Drawn by the unusual cluster of red tunics right in the middle of the platform, some of the passengers gathered around. Ratna Nadar cast an emotional eye over the dilapidated facades of the vast station where once he had disembarked with all his family, driven from his village by the curse of aphids; the same station that today incorporated all his hopes. Thanks to it, to its passengers’ mountains of bags and packages and to the heavy crates in its cargo bays, he was going to be able to pay back the twelve thousand rupees borrowed from Pulpul Singh for his daughter’s wedding. Every train would bring him nearer to that blessed day when he would be able to recover the property deed he had pawned to the moneylender.
Less than half a mile away, the curtain was rising on the tragedy of which the journalist Rajkumar Keswani had forewarned the people of Bhopal. The supervisor Shekil Qureshi showed no signs of hurrying his cup of tea. In his opinion the man in charge of the control room was overreacting. He knew that thirty pounds of pressure per square inch were not really grounds for alarm. The South Charleston engineers had designed the MIC tanks with special steel and walls thick enough to resist pressures five or six times greater. But the needle on the dial in the control room had now leaped up again and, at 55 psig, was at the upper end of the scale on the dial. More important, it was twice the limit the engineers referred to as the “permitted maximum working pressure.” Was the instrument malfunctioning as Qureshi supposed, or was the pressure it was showing real? For Suman Dey, there was only one way to find out: by going into the zone where the three tanks were, to look at the pressure gauge directly attached to tank 610. If it confirmed the figures on the control room dial, then something out of the ordinary was going on.
“Let’s go, Chandra!” said Dey to one of the operators on duty.
“Are we taking the masks?”
“You bet! Masks and bottles!” insisted Dey, who had a visceral fear of chemical substances.
Each bottle was guaranteed to last half an hour. When it was down to just five minutes’ worth of oxygen, an alarm went off.
It took less than three minutes for the two men to get to tank 610 and establish that the needle on the pressure gauge was also indicating 55 psig. Dey climbed onto the concrete sarcophagus in which the tank was imbedded, knelt down on the top, took off his glove and palpated the metal casing meticulously.
“There’s a hell of a lot of movement going on in there!” he shouted through his mask.
The stirring he had felt was the now gaseous methyl isocyanate sweeping into the pipes leading to the decontamination tower. That was where it was supposed to go in such circumstances. But, that night, the stopcocks controlling access to the safety device were turned off because the factory was not in service. Under pressure that was mounting by the minute, the column of gas was popping bolts like champagne corks. Some of the gas then escaped, giving rise to the sort of small brownish cloud that operators Singh and Varma had spotted before their tea break. Both had returned hastily to the zone where the pipes were being cleaned, this time equipped with masks and oxygen bottles. The first thing they did was turn off the water tap, turned on four hours earlier by their colleague Rehman Khan. Even with their masks on, they could smell powerful gas emissions.
“It stinks of MIC and phosgene too,” grunted V.N. Singh, who had recognized the characteristic smell of freshly mown grass.
“And of MMA!” added Varma, picking up the suffocating smell of monomythylamine ammonia.
A hissing noise like that