At least 11 people have been killed and hundreds more taken to hospital after a gas leak at a chemical factory in south-east India.
A plastics plant owned by South Korea’s LG Corp started leaking styrene into the surrounding residential area at about 3am on Thursday. Some people were enveloped as they slept, while others collapsed in the streets as they tried to flee the area on the outskirts of the coastal city of Visakhapatnam.
Officials said the leak was from two 5,000-tonne tanks and happened as workers were preparing to restart the facility after a coronavirus lockdown was eased. A blanket of gas spread over a radius of about 3km (1.8 miles), sickening people in at least four villages.
A second leak was feared early on Friday morning, triggering a wider evacuation. N. Surendra Anand, a fire officer in Visakhapatnam district, said people in a 5 kilometre (3.1 miles)radius of the factory were being moved out of their homes into waiting buses as a precaution.
“Our initial information is that workers were checking a gas storage tank when it started leaking. Only a thorough investigation will reveal what exactly happened,” said the industries minister, M Goutham Reddy, earlier.
Hundreds of people were admitted to hospital with symptoms of gas exposure. Police charges have been filed against LG Corp for negligence and culpable homicide.
MG Reddy, 38, who lives with his wife and two sons 500 metres from the factory, said he woke at about 4am to a burning sensation in his eyes. He presumed the government was spraying the area with disinfectant for coronavirus and so went back to sleep.
“But by 6am everyone in the village was screaming and running, so I also took my family and ran,” said Reddy. “I saw so many people collapsing in the street or screaming that their eyes were burning. I saw many people lying in the road but I could not think about rescuing anyone, I could only think of saving my family.”
Video footage showed pavements and roads littered with limp bodies, and screaming parents carrying seemingly lifeless children in their arms as they ran.
Swarupa Rani, an assistant commissioner of police in Visakhapatnam, said officers who rushed to the scene had to quickly retreat for fear of being poisoned. “One could feel the gas in the air and it was not possible for any of us to stay there for more than a few minutes,” she said.
By late morning, police were going door to door to houses near to the factory to pull unconscious bodies from beds.
K Anitha, 22, said she had emerged from her house and “simply could not understand why people are lying down on the ground”. Moments later, she felt a burning sensation in her eyes and throat and began vomiting and swiftly fell unconscious. “I was in the hospital when I woke up,” she said.
Divya, a doctor at King George’s hospital, where the victims were brought in their hundreds, described scenes of chaos. “One after another there was a flood of victims brought in unconscious. Some of them were even vomiting blood,” she said.
One of the victims, a medical student, was overcome with fumes and fell from his balcony, said Dr Surendra Kumar Chellarapu, a neurosurgeon at King George’s hospital. “He woke up gasping for breath and rushed out on to the balcony of his room for air. But he lost his balance and fell two floors down from the balcony. He died later at the hospital of head injuries.”
Acute exposure to styrene gas causes respiratory and neurological symptoms and is lethal in extremely high doses. “Most were suffering from vomiting, eye irritation, skin rashes and breathing problems but most are out of danger,” said Chellarapu.
Several doctors at the hospital voiced concern that the influx of patients would lead to coronavirus being spread among victims and doctors, with the area already a containment zone.
“It was like an avalanche of the victims being rushed to various wards here in ambulances, cars and even on two-wheelers,” said Adarsh, a doctor at King George’s hospital. “We did not have time to put on the PPE, we simply had to jump in to save the victims.”
A general surgeon at King George’s hospital, Dr N Dwarakanath, said that of about 300 patients there, most were older, more than 40 were children and 15 were on ventilators.
Lakshmi, who was among those being treated at the hospital, began sobbing uncontrollably when she awoke and learned her mother was among the dead. “I don’t know how I got here,” she said. “There was a pungent smell, I felt uneasy and then I fainted.”
LG Corp released a statement late on Thursday morning indicating that gas had stopped leaking from the plant. “We would like to express our deepest condolences to the deceased and their families,” it said. “We have mobilised our technical teams to work with the investigating authorities to arrive at the exact cause of the incident.”
Visakhapatnam is an industrial port city halfway between Kolkata and Chennai, and has about 5 million residents. The wider region has a cluster of chemical factories, about which environmentalists have regularly raised concerns.
EAS Sarma, a former Indian finance secretary who lives a few miles from the residential area where the plant is located, said residents had been raising concerns for years about its safety. “The industrial safety culture in this state is very poor and the regulatory bodies are very lax,” he said.
Indeed, the explosion was one of three which occurred in within hours of each other on Thursday morning as factories across India prepared to resume operations as lockdown restrictions on industry were eased. Seven people were taken to hospital after a gas leak in a paper factory in Chhattisgarh, and another seven were injured when a boiler burst at a coalmining factory in Tamil Nadu.
Thursday’s scenes evoked bitter memories of a gas leak from a pesticide plant in the central city of Bhopal in December 1984,on one of the worst industrial disasters in history. About 3,500 people, mainly in shanties around the plant operated by Union Carbide, died in the days that followed and thousands more lost lives in the following years. People continue to suffer the after-effects.