Bhopal survivor stories of protective action and heroism

Stories from and about the survivors of the Bhopal disaster depict what happened on the night of the gas leak and its aftermath from a survivor’s point of view. These stories are resurfacing on Facebook, particularly in the Students for Bhopal group’s discussion board, as well as in some blog posts and YouTube videos. Such stories explain protective actions that were taken or could have been taken during the gas leak and even contain accounts of heroism.

In July 2008, Sachin Jain shared his survivor story in the Facebook group discussion topic he created called ‘What’s your story … on the fateful night of Dec 3, 1984?’¹ As his family ran from the gas, he remembered how ‘somebody suggested to go near the lakes as the gas is soluble in water [and] so the amount of gas in the air there would be less.’ Similarly, a medical officer who previously worked at the plant told people that night, ‘If you have to go outside, go against the wind. To dissolve the gas, put a wet cloth on your face and along your doors and windows to prevent gas from leaking into the house.’ Such protective actions could have saved thousands of lives, and this is arguably one reason people share and distribute such stories – to learn from the past. They are now recounted in Facebook posts and in the BBC’s One Night in Bhopal docudrama, which can be found on YouTube.²

Jain also remembers a story about a night watchman at the Union Carbide plant who first noticed the leak. He writes:

Elsewhere, a ‘heroic story of a station master’ appeared on a blog post by Mani Padma entitled ‘Survivor story – Bhopal Gas tragedy.’³ Upon realizing the severity of the gas leak, the train station master ‘valiantly attempted to signal all trains not to stop … [and] kept on at his post trying to contact stations to stop entering the city instead of fleeing and taking cover and in the process he lost his life.’ Though such stories about the heroes that emerged from the crisis exist, they are not as frequent as the ‘horror’ stories from ‘victims.’

Research on Bhopal gas leak in Wikipedia

For this study, we interviewed the main contributor of the ‘Bhopal disaster’ Wikipedia article,⁴ Ingrid Eckerman, who made nearly 17 percent of the edits. In addition to being a family physician and having existing ties to the Bhopali medical community, she researched and synthesized known facts between the 1960s and 2003 about the disaster (Eckerman, 2005), which was the basis for her Wikipedia activity. In an e-mail interview, Eckerman explains the state of affairs before she began her Wikipedia work:

She used the content and structure of her book to contribute to the account of the pre-event phase, the gas leak ‘impact’ phase, and the immediate post-event phase of the disaster.

One question often raised about technological disasters is whether it was preventable (Perrow, 1999, 2007). The physical cause of the gas leak was water leaking into a methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas tank; it is still debated whether this was an operator error or an act of sabotage. Still, many warning signs have been documented indicating that a disaster would inevitably happen, with Wikipedia contributors listing such signs as appearing as early as 1976. Many explicit warnings occurred in 1982, when a safety audit by US engineers recorded the neglected condition of the plant. Some believe that the disaster could have been mitigated had warnings been heeded. Others argue that globalization is the root cause of industrial disasters (Eckerman, 2005; Perrow, 1999, 2007).

The unfinished story of Bhopal

Many consider the Bhopal gas leak to be an ongoing disaster. It not only killed three generations of people in some families but it also harmed subsequent generations: many of the children born of gas-affected parents suffer from chronic health problems. Adil Laiq Ahmed, a Bhopali born after the gas leak, treats the Bhopal tragedy as an ongoing disaster in the names he gives for his Facebook group and page (‘Bhopal GaS Tragedy [25,000+ dead and counting]’ and ‘The Unfinished Story of Bhopal 1984’). An interview with Debosmita Nandy, who wrote a blog post⁵ on the Bhopal Tragedy after a recent verdict, reveals that she thinks of this tragedy as ‘a timeless disaster.’ Just before the 25th anniversary of the disaster in 2009, The Bhopal Medical Appeal⁶ advocacy group used Twitter to post: ‘20 days to go until 25th anniversary of the 1984 Bhopal disaster. It’s not history. People still suffer.’

Some people try to communicate the ongoing suffering by providing statistics through social media. In response to one of the most-viewed YouTube videos about Bhopal, entitled Bhopal Gas Disaster,⁷ one YouTube user comments:

Such statistics express a message about how the impact of the gas leak has affected Bhopalis on a massive scale since the day it happened. Consider how Debosmita Nandy starts her blog post:

While many Bhopalis face the ongoing effects of the disaster on a daily basis, these survivors and many of their supporters worldwide are leveraging social solidarity to argue for disaster mitigation by discussing the lack of safety and corporate responsibility issues that ultimately created and prolonged this disaster.

Witnessing the 9/11 attacks and the missing person fliers

The September 11, 2001 attacks (aka 9/11) are often described as the ‘most photographed and videotaped event in history.’ As TV news stations began reporting the first plane crash into the WTC 1 (North Tower), eyewitnesses used their own digital cameras to record the event. While people were recording, a second plane crashed into the WTC 2 (South Tower). As a result thousands of ‘born-digital’ videos and photos were generated during the attacks, the first broad public documentary of its kind.

Many of these digital photos and videos now appear on YouTube in amateur and professional documentaries. For example, the amateur video called September 11 2001: What We Saw⁸ – which has received over 7.3 million views and over 43,000 comments thus far – documents the attacks from the camerawoman’s apartment home on the 36th floor of a building 500 yards away from the North Tower. The introductory caption states, ‘Our unique perspective has an important historical value, and shows the horror of the day without soundtracks or hype often seen in other accounts.’ Near the end of the film, she says, ‘This is the documentarian in me that feels like I need to record this.’ These numerous born-digital artifacts taken from multiple people and points of view are now prosthetic memories to those who did not experience the attacks firsthand. They also have been used in investigations to determine how the WTC buildings collapsed.

Some of most striking photos that emerged from those who witnessed the immediate aftermath of the attacks were on the missing person flyers posted around public spaces in New York City. They each were initially crafted to provide information to identify a missing person. They often included a personal photo, a physical description, work location in the WTC towers, or other information about how the missing person might otherwise be located. They appeared en masse at subway stops, in Union Square, along lampposts, and in other highly convergent places around the city. Over time they collectively became spontaneous memorials, giving tribute to the many who lost their lives on 9/11. Although these artifacts have now disappeared from New York City’s physical landscape, the memories of the missing person flyers can still be found in the digital photos shared online on sites like Flickr and online archives like Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs.⁹

Revealing the pre-9/11 events and the 9/11 truth

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the source was deemed to be terrorism. Here we describe the narratives that address the pre-event conditions in the History Commons website, which allows people to create timelines about different topics. Each timeline contains multiple events to provide contextual details from vetted sources. We examined the ‘Complete 911 Timeline,’¹⁰ which contains 6,374 events preceding, during, and after the 2001 attacks. In the ‘Before 9/11’ category, it contains 754 events starting in 1976 with events associated with the Soviet War in Afghanistan, warning signs, insider trading, foreknowledge, US air security, military exercises, pipeline politics, and other pre-9/11 events. Derek Mitchell, the site’s creator, explains in an interview that its purpose is to ‘reclaim control of our story, our narrative.’ The site explains it in this way:

The use of ICT by a network of ‘9/11 Truth’ groups, which ask, ‘How did we get here?’ illuminates how ICT platforms can serve as a message. They remind people of significant events that happened on September 11 as well as pre- and post-9/11, and they document their evidence. They believe that 9/11 was not an unexpected attack and was instead a ‘false-flag operation.’ Using blogs, DVDs with 9/11 documentaries, and online networking sites like Meetup and Facebook, they actively share their views.

The ongoing effects of the September 11 attacks

In a ‘post-9/11 world,’ the effects of these attacks continue to reverberate in ongoing narratives about the event. A blog post by Charles Scaliger called ‘9/11 Terror Attacks & Their Effect on America’¹¹ explains how the open-ended character of the phrase ‘War on Terrorism’ has ‘the potential over a generation or two to undo much of the legal and constitutional fabric of our republic.’ He urges that:

People are using today’s social media to examine implications that are becoming more obvious, including long-term health effects on those who were exposed to toxic debris. The ‘Health effects arising from the September 11 attacks’ Wikipedia article,¹² created five years after the attack, details how this crisis is appearing in the form of chronic health conditions like cancer and respiratory disease. This article is a collective account of this crisis using 81 sources. It breaks down the different types of political controversies surrounding the Environmental Protection Agency’s statements regarding air quality in and around Ground Zero immediately after the attacks.

Katrina survivor memories worth preserving and critiquing

Katrina survivor stories have appeared in Facebook groups like ‘Hurricane Katrina Survivors.’¹³ Some people will never forget the ‘pain and death,’ while others miss the loss of sentimental items like family pictures. Still many others emphasize how they ‘miss the life’ that they had pre-Katrina, especially those who are now displaced. In a story shared by one of the Facebook group members during the five-year anniversary, she explains how Hurricane Katrina ‘was the day that I was torn away from the family and friends that I knew most of my life,’ but goes on to mention how ‘it is great that we have this page and we have Facebook to reconnect.’ For some survivors, like Mary C. Theriot, Katrina taught her to ‘never live that close to a levee or a lake like Pontchartrain, again.’

Amidst these survivor stories that explain the loss of their way of life and the lessons to be learned, analyses about how the media framed Katrina survivors’ actions also arose. Just days after Katrina hit, social media users responded to a controversy around two news photos, one used the word ‘looting’ in its caption while the other one used the word ‘finding.’ On August 31, 2005, Flickr user Tricia Wang decided to upload a screenshot that included the two photos and explained this controversy in her caption. She titled this photo ‘Finding-Looting: Comparing Representations in the Visual Reporting of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.’¹⁴ A photo by an Associated Press (AP) photographer captures a dark-skinned man with the caption: ‘A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans.’ A Getty Images photo by an Agence France-Presse (AFP) photographer captures two light-skinned people with the caption: ‘Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store …’ This Flickr photo received 129,000 views and 234 comments. Wang’s caption emphasizes how word choice associated with the two photos affects the viewer’s interpretation of survivors’ actions. Such commentary within social media sites provides another interpretive layer to the collective narratives about Hurricane Katrina, which can play an important role in how Katrina survivors are remembered in the future.

Within two months of Katrina and the subsequent Hurricane Rita, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank¹⁵ was set up with the purpose of using ‘electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record’ of the hurricanes. It currently contains 43,300 artifacts including firsthand accounts, on-scene images, blog posts, and podcasts. A range of survivor stories emerged in this memory bank and in the social media landscape, such as stories depicting the intensity of the storm, the lessons of survival, and how one reacts to a crisis. But ‘as colorful as these survival stories are there only seems to be a momentary thrill of morbid curiosity in it,’ says Glenn E. Miller, a Katrina survivor and interviewee for this research. Miller believes that the recovery stories ‘including the extraordinary charity that was offered’ have a lasting value, and it is the stories that depict ‘weird and unusual events, sudden acts of unexpected charity, moments of joy in the middle of struggle, strange coincidences, shocking moments, stories of intense improvising or funny, quirky events that brought humor to the middle of tragedy’ that should be preserved.

Reviving the pre-Katrina history

One narrative that has emerged in the social media landscape is how Hurricane Katrina was not an unexpected disaster caused solely by a natural hazard, but rather a human-induced catastrophe as a result of technological and socio-political failures. Nearly a third of the events that appear in History Commons’ ‘Hurricane Katrina’¹⁶ timeline project are categorized as ‘Before Katrina.’ The first event that appears is titled ‘1930-2005: More than 1.2 Million Acres of Louisiana’s Coastal Wetlands Disappear’ and includes numerous references to reports from official sources, such as the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers and the National Wetlands Research Center.

The following is an excerpt from a blog post by Fran Taylor explaining the significance of this wetland loss after interviewing Malik Rahim, the founder of the Common Ground Relief grassroots organization:¹⁷

Such blog posts depict how some people want to remind others of the symbiotic relationship between nature and society. Yet, other narratives arose about how Hurricane Katrina was a technological disaster because of the failure of the levee system. In a YouTube video entitled ‘hurricane katrina banned footage’¹⁸ with the description ‘footage that george bush didn’t want the public to see!!,’ an ABC News reporter interviews local residents who believe that the city blew up the levees to save wealthier neighborhoods, as they had done in 1927. Although this deliberate act may not have happened in 2005, one blogger who created the ‘Hurricane Katrina Pictures’ blog¹⁹ still emphasizes that ‘The New Orleans flood was not a natural disaster. It was man-made. The Army Corp of Engineers under-engineered, falsified data, and ignored the facts of the real dangers of the levee system.’

Another narrative describing the socio-political aspects of Katrina explains the breakdown of the official response effort. This narrative emerges in many places, sometimes with extensive documentation of the political shift from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to the Department of Homeland Security as the basis for justifying this account.

Still surviving Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast more than five years ago but only some neighborhoods have rebuilt and recovered from the devastation. The Repopulation Indicators for New Orleans map mashup provided a visual indication of the neighborhoods and city blocks that are repopulating. ²⁰Those who were able to rebuild were hindered by the rise of ‘exploiters,’ a type of disaster converger (Kendra and Wachtendorf, 2003).

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, some people began documenting contractor fraud; this type of fraud further victimized Katrina survivors. Although people began sharing their stories with neighbors and friends, it was not enough to get the word out. The blog ‘Hurricane Katrina SOS: The aftermath was far worse than the storm …’²¹ created a post called ‘Contractor Fraud [and] FEMA Negligence’ that includes a YouTube video to warn others about this danger.

Another way in which Hurricane Katrina is depicted as an ongoing disaster is through continuous updates on the rebuilding efforts by grassroots organizations like the St. Bernard Project,²² a ‘nonprofit disaster recovery organization in New Orleans dedicated to rebuilding the homes and lives of Hurricane Katrina survivors’ by addressing ‘the physical, emotional, and psychological devastation caused by the storm.’ They use Facebook and Twitter to keep people updated on their recovery efforts. They created a Facebook fan page as a way for the volunteers to stay connected to each other after they leave. They also created Facebook pages for each house being rebuilt, which are updated weekly with pictures and a summary of the volunteers’ work, allowing volunteers who helped earlier to see building progress.

We are beginning to see other grassroots disaster recovery organizations using social media outlets to publicize their activities. Such social media content has the potential of adding to the collective narrative about the ongoing repercussions of the disaster.