Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (38 page)

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 of a jet stream was suddenly heard overhead. Instantly they looked up at the network of pipes. A
geyser had just burst from the spot where they had first detected the gas leak. Despite his terror V.N. Singh managed to keep
a cool head. There was only one thing to do in such circumstances. He had done it before at the time of the great fire in
the alpha-naphthol unit. He hurled himself at the nearest alarm point, broke the glass, and pressed the button that set off
the general alarm siren.

The howl wrested Shekil Qureshi from his cup of tea. He ran out of the cafeteria and rushed to the control room where he met
V.N. Singh, who had just come back up from the pipe-cleaning zone. Singh took off his mask. He was livid.

“The worst has happened. There’s nothing we can do,” he muttered, shaking his head, overwhelmed.

Qureshi protested fiercely, “It must be possible to contain this bloody reaction. I’m going quickly to see what’s going on.”

Singh called after his disappearing figure, “Your mask!”

“Can’t give orders with that thing over my face!” replied the Muslim, who was already scrambling down the stairway.

When he reached the erupting geyser, he stopped dead in his tracks. He could not believe his eyes. “It’s not true …” he murmured.
There he was, the man who had been so convinced that no accident could happen in a factory that was not running, witnessing
precisely the catastrophe of which all Carbide’s manuals, all its safety exercises, and all its security campaigns had persistently
warned against: a terrifying, uncontrollable, cataclysmic exothermic reaction of methyl isocyanate. A massive reaction of
a whole tank full, not just a few drops left in a pipe. How had such an accident come about, despite all the safety regulations?
Qureshi beat a retreat and made for the zone where the tanks were. He had an idea. Even if it was too late to stem the eruption
of tank 610, at least the contamination could be prevented from reaching the twenty tons stored in tank 611. His eyes were
beginning to burn painfully. He was having progressively more difficulty breathing. In a blur he saw Suman Dey and his companion
descending from the sarcophagus onto which they had courageously climbed to check the pressure indicator. The tank and its
concrete casing were trembling, cracking and creaking as if shaken by an earthquake. The voice of the Muslim supervisor was
faintly audible through the chaos.

“We must isolate 610! We must isolate 610!” He shouted himself out of breath.

Suman Dey did not agree. By turning off the valves and stopcocks connecting the reacting tank to its neighbor, they would
risk increasing the pressure and possibly set off an explosion. But Qureshi had faith in the tank’s capacity to resist anything.
How could this technological masterpiece that he had once witnessed arrive from Bombay, this precious jewel, the connections
to which he had lovingly maintained, repaired and nurtured for so many years, possibly disintegrate like some common petrol
tank? Dragging his two companions with him, he threw himself at the pipework. The ground was cracking beneath their feet.
There was a noise as if the end of the world were coming. In ten minutes, they managed to shut off all communication between
the two tanks. The twenty tons stored in the tank 611 would not be caught up in the gaseous apocalypse.

Their task completed, they immediately retreated at a run. Before disappearing into the stairway leading to the control room,
they turned around. Tank 610’s concrete carapace had just shattered, releasing an enormous steel tank that emerged from its
sarcophagus like a rocket, stood vertically, toppled, fell and stood up again before tumbling heavily onto the concrete and
metal debris. But it had not burst. From a ruptured pipe at ground level a second geyser then erupted, more powerful and even
fiercer than the first.

Before entering the control room Qureshi glanced at the wind sock flying from the top of its mast. He grimaced. Filled by
an unremitting wind, the white material cone pointed clearly south, toward the neighborhoods of the Kali Grounds, the station
and the old part of the city. That night, however, true Carbider that he was, he felt most responsible for the safety of his
men. He turned to the chief of the watch.

“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.”

F
or 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 for all his blessings by dancing
for him and for all the occupants of Orya Bustee. Discreetly she had gone to her hut to change from her wedding sari into
the costume worn by performers of Odissi, the traditional Orissan dance. True, it was not made out of silk embroidered with
gold thread, like those of the temple dancers, but of simple cotton material. But what did that matter? Dalima and Sheela
adjusted her bodice and draped the material around her thighs before spreading it out like a fan from her waist to her knees.
They caught the young woman’s long tresses up in a bun and adorned it with a braid of jasmine flowers, then fastened imitation
jewelry around her neck, in her ears, round her arms, wrists and waist. Finally they put anklets with bells on her ankles.
The god would be pleased. The blood of Orissa definitely flowed through the veins of the former peasant girl from Mudilapa.
And it was the thousand-year-old culture of her distant home that carried the young newlywed along, as her bare feet began
to pound the mandap on which she had sealed her marriage but a short time previously.