At least 11 people were killed and hundreds of others were wounded by a toxic gas leak from a chemical plant in Andhra Pradesh state, southeast India.
The accident occurred early Thursday in a factory run by the South Korean company LG Kim near the coastal city of Visakhapatnam, and state police said the gas leaked from two tanks with a capacity of five thousand tons, noting that the two tanks were not being monitored due to the isolation measures imposed to combat the spread Corona Virus.
The police said that a fire broke out before the leak and it was controlled, and the local authorities and the Korean company confirmed that the leak was stopped.
The factory produces polystyrene products that are used in the manufacture of electric fan blades, cups and cosmetic packaging containers. The styrene raw material is highly flammable and releases toxic gas when burned.
Hundreds of people were taken to hospitals after suffering from health problems, including difficulty breathing, and among the injured were children.
While a local official in Andhra Pradesh reported that a thousand people within three kilometers of the factory site had difficulty breathing and inflammation of the eyes, The Times of India newspaper reported that five thousand people have developed symptoms including skin rash, in addition to difficulty breathing and eye inflammation.
And footage broadcast by Indian media showed people lying on the sidewalks apparently after being fainted, while an official in Indra Pradesh state said that one of the dead had died after jumping from the second floor of an apartment building, while another was killed by falling into a well while fleeing the vicinity of the factory .
The accident brought to mind the catastrophe of a gas leak from a pesticide plant in the city of Bhopal in central India in 1984, killing at the time 3,500 people, mostly residents of slums in the vicinity of the factory operated by Union Carbide, while thousands more died in the following years.