Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [110]
“Suman! Turn your siren on and yell into the loudspeakers. Get everyone to assemble in the formulation zone on the north side, except the operators in our unit who should remain available with their masks. We may need them later.”
39
Lungs Bursting in the Heart of the Night
For the supervisor Shekil Qureshi, the young Muslim who, at his wedding in Bhopal’s great mosque, had thought he could wear no finer clothing than “the linen coverall with the blue-and-white logo,” all was not yet lost. He wanted to attempt the impossible.
“Suman! Try and get the decontamination tower up and running,” he ordered the man in charge of the control room. “You never know, perhaps the maintenance team has finished its repairs.”
Suman Dey tried the control lever, but there was no reaction on the dial on the control panel. The indicator did not light up and the pressure needle remained at zero.
The telephone rang. Qureshi picked it up. It was S.P. Chowdhary, the production manager, calling from his villa in Arera Colony on the other side of Bhopal. He had just been woken by one of the night-shift operators.
“I’ll be there as quickly as I can!” he shouted into the phone. “In the meantime try and get the flare going!”
Qureshi could not believe his ears. What? The man in charge of production at the factory did not know that the emergency flare was undergoing repairs?
“The flare?” he repeated. “But there are five or six yards of pipe missing from it! They were rotten.”
“Replace them!” the production manager insisted.
Qureshi held the telephone receiver outside the window. “Do you hear that? That’s gas pouring out. Even if we were to manage to replace the pipes, we’d have to be out of our minds to light the flare. We’d all be blown up and the factory and the entire city with us!”
Furious, Qureshi hung up, but he still refused to admit defeat. “Get me the fire squad!” he told Suman Dey.
Qureshi begged Carbide’s fire chief to send men as fast as possible to douse the geyser spurting out from under the decontamination tower. He knew that water, which could cause the methyl isocyanate to explode in an enclosed environment could also neutralize it in the open air—a chemical contradiction that had induced the three American engineers who came to inspect the factory in 1982 to call for the installation of an automatic sprinkler system in the sensitive MIC production zone. Their recommendation had not been implemented, and as a result, men would have to risk their lives trying to act as human sprinklers.
In less than five minutes, the firemen were on the scene. Almost immediately, their chief’s voice came over the radio speaker.
“Impossible to reach the leak! Our hose jets won’t go that high!”
This time Qureshi realized that there was nothing more he could do.
“Give the order for everyone to evacuate, directly to the north,” he ordered Suman Dey, “and let’s get out of here!”
The proud Muslim rushed to the cloakroom to pick up his mask. But his locker was empty and his mask was gone. He had to escape with his face exposed. With his eyes burning, his throat on fire and gasping for breath, he ran like a madman. He thought of his wife and children. “I was so afraid of dying, I felt capable of anything,” he said later. In fact, he did scale the six-foot-high perimeter wall of the factory and the coils of barbed wire on top and drop down on the other side. In his fall, he tore his chest and broke an ankle. Fortunately for him, the wind was driving the bulk of the deadly cloud in the opposite direction.
Blissfully unaware of the tragedy occurring a few hundred yards from the Kali Grounds, Dilip and Padmini’s wedding guests were having a marvelous time. Padmini had kept a surprise in store for them. No feast took place in India without homage also being paid to the gods. That night the young woman was going to give thanks to Jagannath