Biggest man-made disaster?

The Railway Men: The Untold Story of Bhopal 1984 (miniseries; 2023)
Director: Shiv Rawail

I have come to know of a few people who were working on the Malaysian Railway Lines (Keretapi Tanah Melayu, KTM). They were working at a time when owning a car was a luxury, and interstate travel meant travelling on the train. So much responsibility fell on the shoulders of the Station Master of a railway station. Much like the captain of a ship, the Station Master would take care of his station like a baby. The post carried such pride in the community that people would have forgotten his name. They would just address him as Station Master, much like how one would address a Doctor or Pastor, not by name.

Amongst our family circle lived a distant relative who was the Station Master of the Bukit Mertajam Railway Station. The job was a prestigious one, and it carried much prestige. Bukit Mertajam was an essential and busy station. Even though his name was Jaganathan, everyone referred to his family as the 'Station Master's' family. My sisters and I call him 'Train Tata' (Train Grandfather). Train Tata was married to his job, besides having ten children. He would personally be present at the station every time a train stopped there. His pride and joy were his sparkling and shiny railway shifters.  

I never had the opportunity to have an up-and-personal conversation with Train Tata about his job. The main character in this miniseries, Iftekaar Siddiqui, reminded me a lot of him.

The tragic industrial accident in Bhopal hit our shores back in 1983. From the occasional glimpses we got from the foreign news section of the national TV, we understood the devastation it caused. Later in my working life, I did encounter people who were right smack in the heat of things, doing medicine in Bhopal, albeit a few years after the biggest man-made disaster in history. As its death toll exceeded 15,000, after taking the long-term damages that it caused, it is said to have been a greater disaster than Chornobyl or Twin Towers. 

Watching the fiasco unfold on Netflix, we get a better understanding of the background of it all. The blast in the Union Carbide chemical factory was a volcano waiting to explode, as described by an independent journalist after his friend died in a minor industrial accident three years previously. The whole thing was hushed. 

Working with suboptimal pieces of machinery and ill-trained staff, even the owners of the pesticide-making company, who is credited for making the atomic bomb, knew they were sitting on a disaster. An independent assessor even remarked that the methyl isocyanate (MIC) the factory stores were storing was at risk of leakage. The faulty cooling system, substandard safety measures, and defective pressure gauges could potentially release poisonous cyanide into the environment. Antidote was known by a few, but this information was deliberately kept away from the public and even the administrative agencies. Very few workers were cognisant of the standard operative procedure in case of a catastrophic gas leak. 

Minor blemishes did happen but were kept under wraps. The disaster occurred on December 2, 1984, when the system overheated and poisonous gas leaked into the atmosphere. 

The miniseries tells of how the railway men of Bhopal station and the GM of railways tirelessly went out of their way to render their services to help people affected by the gas leak. Even though the account of events that happened that night is told in a dramatic fashion, the essential characters in the series did exist, but with different names. Unfortunately, the film failed to mention the names of these unsung heroes at the credit in a way to show appreciation.

Iftekaar Siddiqui, the Station master character, could be Ghulam Destagir, who protected passengers and arranged a safe passage out of Bhopal Junction. The selfless investigative journalist named Jagmohan Kulwant here is Rajkumar Deswani in real life. He went on to win many journalistic awards. There was indeed a railway inspector who was on a surprise visit to Jhansi when the incident happened. He was Gauri Shanker, the General Manager of the Northern Railways. In the series, he was known as Rati Pandey.

The moviemakers decided to spice up the story by including bits about the Sikh witchhunt, as Indira Gandhi had been assassinated a month prior. The part about governmental cover-up is probably not stretching the truth. There were reports of hushing about the severity of the mishap, malaise on the part of rescue efforts and protection of its foreign owners.  

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Of hope and deliverance..

In spite Nosradamus' and other doomsday prophets' predictions of impending doom to the human race and human civilization, we as a race have managed to pull through thus far. Many economists have also forecast widespread famine and starvation by the end of the 19th century after looking at the exponentially world population growth versus the slow increase in food supply. And the holier-than-thou preachers of various religions of the world ostracized John Hunter and his medical team for finding a cure then for syphilis (which was considered as God's punishment for people indulging in unholy union of sexes) who predicted that the End was near for evil ruled the world which supposedly will cause God's wrath and annihilation of the human race.  

Houston, we have a problem!

We managed to dodge all these. When we are fed up and tired of reading and hearing of destruction and decadence, we occasionally hear of the undying fighting spirit of the human race. After the Apollo 13 rescue mission, this can be the next breaking news of drama in real life. The people of Chile collectively ought to be proud of their accomplishment.69days of 33 miners rescued in one piece! My No.1 candidate for Man of the year 2010. Chilean mine disaster rescue mission. Viva Chile!

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2025950,00.html

Lessons from the Chile Mine Rescue: What Underdogs Can Teach Us

By Tim Padgett / San José Mine Friday, Oct. 15, 2010

Trapped miner Luis Urzua (C) stands with Chile's 

President Sebastian Pinera after reaching the surface 

and emerging from the "Phoenix" rescue capsule to

 become the last to be rescued from the San Jose mine

in Copiapo. Hugo Infante / Reuters

Jimmy Sánchez, 19, the youngest miner, is a talented soccer forward, but he doesn't score all that many goals because his first (and fairly admirable) instinct when he senses an opposing counterattack is to drop back and help out on defense. Mario Gómez, 63, the oldest, has silicosis, a common lung ailment among miners, but he's kept at the job because he wants to augment the support of his seven grandchildren, the youngest of whom turned seven months the day before he was rescued. 

The first to emerge, Florencio Avalos, 31, is so shy he volunteered to be the cameraman to video-monitor the other miners' health for officials at the surface so he didn't have to be filmed himself. The last to emerge, Luis Urzúa, 54, is an avuncular foreman whose firm but calm discipline — not to mention his judicious rationing of paltry supplies of canned tuna and oily water — held his 32 crew members together during the two weeks before help arrived, even when it must have seemed to many of them that they were doomed to die 2,000 feet underground.

One of the quieter is Darío Segovia, 48, who's been mining since he was eight-years old and had already been through so many on-the-job accidents, his mother Margarita told me, that even during this ordeal he felt "like a cat who has at least three or four lives left." One of the more gregarious is Mario Sepúlveda, 40, who played the emcee on the first video of the miners sent up after they were discovered huddled in their 538-sq-ft subterranean shelter — and who joked with Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, even leading Piñera's cabinet members in rowdy cheers, as soon as he stepped out of the rescue capsule early Wednesday morning.

When books are written about the 70-day saga of the 33 miners who were all pulled alive from the bowels of Chile's collapsed San José Mine this past week — and six- if not seven-figure publishing deals are already being negotiated — they'll no doubt muse at length about what kind of character it takes to survive as extraordinarily as these ordinary men did. But as their profiles suggest, there is no easy answer to that question, and there may be no answer at all. The presence of the shy, steady Avalos helped keep things tranquil below; but the garrulous, cheerful Sepúlveda played just as important a role in keeping the group buoyed (and at times annoyed). Officials above designated both los más hábiles— the most able — and so brought them up in the ultra-claustrophic rescue capsule's first and riskiest ascents.That's why the world responded so passionately to Los 33: not because their heroism revealed itself via scripted type, but because it seemed as unexpected in them as it would in ourselves. And no one exulted more than Latin Americans, who see in the miners a hopeful reminder that their countries don't have to be defined by the corrupt egomaniacs who so often run them. The term for "underdogs" in Spanish is los de abajo — which literally means "those below" — and it's never sounded more gallant to this continent than it does now.
The question is whether the miners can summon the heroism they'll need going forward — namely, not succumbing to either the post-traumatic stress that psychologists say awaits them as surely as the first sunrises they're seeing since the Aug. 5 mine collapse, or to the corrosive effects of the money and fame already rising around their ankles. A Chilean tycoon has sent each of them checks for more than $10,000; Greek islands want them and their families to come luxuriate in the Aegean, and powerhouse European soccer clubs want them to stand on their sidelines. One of the miners, Elvis Presley fan Edison Peña, has been offered a lifetime pass to Graceland. A Chilean TV bombshell has even offered to give each miner a lapdance.

So far they're handling the daylight circus with the same aplomb they displayed in their shadowy tomb. They've agreed to profit from their miraculous story collectively and as evenly as possible. And most of them — like Goómez, whose most important wish at this point is to give his wife Liliana next month the formal church wedding they never had — seem to be focusing less on the lucre ahead of them than on the human riches they ached for underground. (Although for some even that will be a complicated challenge — especially Yonni Barrios, 50, who escaped the mine this week only to fall into a thorny love triangle between him, his wife and his mistress, who turned out to be the woman waiting for him when he emerged.)

This weekend, most if not all the remarkably healthy miners will leave the hospital in Copiapó where they've been under observation. Their families, along with the international media horde, will dismantle Camp Hope, the dusty tent city that grew up alongside the San José mine in the northern Chilean desert during the two-month vigil. It was a symbol of both the religious innocence and carnival cynicism that surrounded this drama, and which promise to follow the miners for months if not years. The best the rest of us can do is embrace the traits that helped them survive — which, as they proved, aren't much more "heroic" than the simple qualities that make us good people — long after the last tent at Camp Hope has been carried away.