Farhat Jahan was five months old on the night of Dec. 2, 1984 when an accident at the Union Carbide plant released a hazardous chemical, methyl isocyanate, or MIC, into the air.
“My father opened the gate to see what was happening. As soon as he opened the gate, the gas entered into our house and all of us started running,” Jahan told an audience at Penn State Beaver in Monaca on a recent night.
Through a translator, Jahan recounted the story that had been passed down through her family about what happened next. Her mother picked her up and tried to flee the fumes.
“She tells me her eyes felt like someone had put acid in them. Her lungs were choking her. She was seeing people around her dying, people in their own body fluids, dying as she was running. Women aborting…right in front of her.”
Bhopal was the worst industrial accident in world history. Up to 10,000 people died in the first few days after the event. Some estimates say that number climbed to 20,000 more in the years that followed.
For its hundreds of thousands of survivors like Jahan, illness and loss have followed. One sister of hers has chronic renal failure and needs dialysis several times a week to survive. Another sister, born four years after the disaster, died at the age of 24 of renal failure. She left two daughters, including one with severe intellectual and physical disabilities.
Now, Jahan is a community health researcher who supports families in Bhopal who are still dealing with the health effects of the disaster.
She came to Beaver County with the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal. The stop was part of a U.S. tour to raise awareness of the plight of people in Bhopal and to call on the current owner of Union Carbide, Dow Chemical, to clean up the still-polluted site.
Much of the plant’s safety equipment, like a cooling unit to prevent chemical reactions and ground flares to burn off hazardous gases, had been dismantled or turned off by the company. The company had no plan to alert the community in case of an emergency, with dire results.
“Even if people would have been told not to run on that night, to cover yourself in wet blankets and stay at home, so many would have been saved,” said Rachna Dhingra, an organizer with the ICJB. “The faster people ran, the faster they died.”
“We are fighting so that no more generations are born disabled. As a result of that, we have come here to ask this American corporation, Dow Chemical, that to clean up its toxic waste.”
A company spokesperson said Dow bought Union Carbide several years after a legal settlement was approved by India’s supreme court. (Union Carbide owned a controlling interest, 50.9%, of the plant’s owner, Union Carbide India Limited.)
That settlement was for $470 million, and families of people who died during the gas leak got an average of $2200.
The remaining population of Bhopal is still nursing their wounded. The city has a high ratio of birth defects, even among babies born many years later.
Thousands there still deal with chronic health problems stemming from the disaster. Bati Bai Rajak, who also came to Beaver County, recounted her own mother’s chronic illness.
“My mother suffered as a result. My mother suffers from pulmonary fibrosis and is completely dependent on an inhaler,” Rajak said.
A message for this region
The group wanted to come to Beaver County after seeing the fiery Norfolk Southern train derailment in nearby East Palestine, Ohio, last year. That spewed around a million pounds of toxic chemicals into the surrounding air and water.
They spoke a few miles from a new Shell chemical plant that has already been fined millions of dollars for polluting the local air.
They were invited by Hilary Flint, communications director of Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community. Flint lives in Beaver County, a few miles from the derailment site. She found similarities in the reactions of Norfolk Southern after the East Palestine derailment and Union Carbide after Bhopal.
“It’s the same playbook. They go through the same thing,” Flint said. “So a lot of the battles that they have won and are ongoing are things we’re very at the beginning of.”
Dhingra said residents who have been exposed to toxic chemicals need to be ready for the difficulties in getting answers from public officials.
‘The agencies that have been entrusted to monitor your health and your pollution will not be on your side. It will be you who will try to get that data,” she said. “Chemicals will be proven innocent until guilty, but it will be people who will be thought of as guilty, of lying and faking their injuries.”
That message resonated with Christina Siceloff, who came to hear the group speak. She lives in Beaver County, a few miles from East Palestine, where she has been monitoring the streams for toxic chemicals despite assurances from regulators that everything is safe.
Siceloff has medical issues and is worried they came from her own exposure after the derailment.
“We have the same problem with getting answers with medicine. Like, what do we do?” Siceloff said. “Is there something we can take to fix this? And there’s nothing you can do.”
Last Wednesday, a federal judge approved a class action settlement for East Palestine, where the maximum payout is $ 70,000 per household and an additional $25,000 per person for personal injury.
The Bhopal group will be in India in December on the 40th anniversary of the Union Carbide disaster.
Read more from our partners, The Allegheny Front.
