'Bhopal site is a toxic mess'

Dominique Lapierre, who wrote a book on worst industrial disasters, says that the Bhopal plant site is still a toxic mess.

Dominique Lapierre, the best-selling author of a book on the worlds worst industrial disaster in Bhopal two decades ago, says it is shameful the plant site is still a toxic mess.

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"Twenty years later, people living in slums around the site are condemned to drink highly poisonous water," said the French writer, who co-authored It Was Five Minutes Past Midnight with Spain's Javier Moro that chronicled the tragedy that killed thousands.

"It's shameful," said Lapierre, who also wrote the blockbuster The City of Joy, a tale of a priest working in a Calcutta slum. "It (the site) is still full of poisons."

He is visiting India to attend ceremonies marking the night of December 3, 1984 when a storage tank at the Union Carbide India Ltd. pesticide plant in the heart of Bhopal spewed deadly cyanide gas into the air.

The 40 tonnes of gas which billowed from the plant killed at least 1,750 slumdwellers on the spot as their lungs filled with the burning gas and another 2,500 according to conservative estimates died in the days following.

But victims' groups say at least 8,000 died in the first days afterward and thousands more later from exposure-related illnesses. They say tens of thousands remain chronically ill.