Suffering from the Bhopal disaster in India continues, 40 years later

YesSHORTLY BEFORE midnight December 2, 1984 methyl isocyanate (microphone), a highly poisonous gas, began leaking from a storage tank at a pesticide factory in the Indian city of Bhopal. Overnight, 27 tons of gas spread silently across the city, suffocating residents as they slept. At dawn, the streets of Bhopal were strewn with bodies, mostly residents of the slums surrounding the factory, owned by Union Carbide, an American company. The number of deaths is still in dispute. According to Amnesty International, a human rights organization, up to 10,000 people died within three days of the accident, and another 12,000 died later as a direct consequence of it. More than half a million people continue to live with injuries.