India's Night of Death: Bhopal

The first sign that something was wrong came at 11 p.m. A worker at the Union Carbide pesticide plant on the outskirts of Bhopal (pop. 672,000), an industrial city 466 miles south of New Delhi, noticed that pressure was building up in a tank containing 45 tons of methyl isocyanate, a deadly chemical used to make pesticides. At 56 minutes past midnight, the substance began escaping into the air from a faulty valve. For almost an hour, the gas formed a vast, dense fog of death that drifted toward Bhopal.

The vapor passed first over the shantytowns of Jaiprakash and Chhola, just outside the walls of the plant, leaving hundreds dead as they slept. The gas quickly enveloped the city's railway station, where beggars were huddled against the chill. In minutes, a score had died and 200 others were gravely ill. Through temples and shops, over streets and lakes, across a 25-sq.-mi. quadrant of the city, the cloud continued to spread, noiselessly and lethally. The night air was fairly cool (about 60° F), the wind was almost calm, and a heavy mist clung to the earth; those conditions prevented the gas from dissipating, as it would have done during the day.

A few hundred yards from the chemical plant, M.A. Khan, a farmer, was lying in bed when he heard several thumps at a nearby dairy farm and sensed that his own cows were milling about restlessly. He arose and went outside. Two cows were dead on the ground. A third gave out a loud groan and collapsed as Khan watched. Then the farmer's eyes began to smart painfully. He ran into the darkness. The day after, at Bhopal's Hamidia Hospital, his eyes shut tightly and tears streaming down his cheeks, Khan described his fear: "I thought it was a plague."

Others thought it was a nuclear bomb or an earthquake or the end of the world. As word of the cloud of poison began to spread, hundreds, then thousands, took to the road in flight from the fumes. In cars and rickshaws, on foot and bicycles, residents moved as fast as they could. As in some eerie science-fiction nightmare, hundreds of people blinded by the gas groped vainly toward uncontaminated air or stumbled into one another in the darkness. Others simply collapsed by the side of the road in the crush. At least 37 people who had inhaled the fumes died hours later from the effects, having reached what they thought was safety.