People carry a woman affected by a chemical gas leak in Vishakhapatnam on May 7.
Footage on Indian television channels showed people, including women and children, lying in the streets of Visakhapatnam, an industrial port city in the state of Andhra Pradesh. “Another thing is that it is still too early in the morning, and there are people who were sleeping inside their homes and are unconscious,” Naik told AFP.
Some of the patients were lying on the beds in the sparse hospital wearing just shorts and without tops or shoes.The city and the surrounding area are home to around five million people. The incident led to panic among locals in a radius of 3km around the plant with many people seen lying unconscious on the roads, the paper said.
India witnessed in December 1984 one of the worst industrial disasters in history when gas leaked from a pesticide plant in the central city of Bhopal.