Global Courant 2023-04-30 14:43:08
At least eleven people were killed and almost as many injured in a gas leak in the northern Indian state of Punjab on Sunday. Officials had sealed off part of Ludhiana town and were evacuating residents as they attempted to identify the gas and determine the source of the leak.
All the victims were found near three businesses in Giapura’s industrial district: a dairy, a grocery store and a clinic. Some lived in apartments above the storefronts. The area is home to garment factories and the people who work there, hundreds of migrant workers from the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
The deaths were mainly caused by suffocation, according to Dr. Hatinder Kaur of Ludhiana Civil Hospital, where the victims were taken and the injured continued to be treated. Two children were among the dead, local news media reported.
Rajinder Pal Kaur Chhina, a member of the local legislature, reached the crime scene about 30 minutes after the first reports began to spread on Sunday morning. She said she saw about half a dozen people lying unconscious on the street near the dairy.
“All these people had gone to buy milk,” Ms. Chhina said by telephone. “We are trying to evacuate people from the neighboring areas.”
The Punjab government has deployed National Disaster Response Force teams to assist in the evacuation, said Surabhi Malik, the deputy commissioner of Ludhiana. Police are also taking gas samples from sewers in the area to identify the gas, she said.
One of the world’s worst industrial disasters occurred in India in 1984, when a gas leak at a Union Carbide pesticide in the central city of Bhopal killed thousands.
