INDORE: Sometime on Saturday night or early Sunday morning, trucks may begin rolling out of Bhopal carrying the remnants of tragic history.
Around 337 tonnes of toxic waste left over from 1984 gas tragedy will be taken 225km away to Pithampur to be turned into smoke and ashes. Bhopal gas tragedy relief and rehabilitation department director Swantantra Kumar Singh has already written to senior officials in Indore, Bhopal and Dhar to prepare for it. A dozen GPS-enabled trucks are ready to move the waste.
On Dec 3, Madhya Pradesh HC set a deadline of four weeks to shift the hazardous waste, stored so far at the abandoned Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, to Pithampur waste disposal facility. “Are you waiting for another tragedy?” HC asked authorities, rapping them for the long delay.
The Union Carbide waste will be disposed of in two stages – incineration and landfill. Once the trucks reach Pithampur Industrial Waste Management Pvt Ltd facility near Tarpura village, trial incineration of 35.6 MT waste will be carried out to understand how long it takes for the waste to be burnt safely, a source told TOI. Three feed rates – 135kg/hr, 80kg/hr and 270kg/hr – will be tried out. The rest of the toxic waste will be incinerated after establishing the optimum feed rate for incineration.
Sources told TOI that a ‘red corridor’ may be created for safe transport of waste.
“We can shift the waste any time, once the packing is complete and security assessment is made. It depends, most probably at night,” Swantantra Kumar Singh told TOI. Sources told TOI that the trucks were likely to begin moving around 4.30am on Sunday.
In 2015, 10MT waste was moved to Pithampur facility for at least seven trial runs, the last of which cleared environmental parameters. This paved the way for the current disposal plan. “We will move the entire waste from Union Carbide factory in one go. We are trying to send all the containers in a single row ensuring maximum safety precautions,” Singh said.
The Pithampur facility has been asked to install a separate electric meter arrangement to run pollution control devices. If any of the devices stops functioning, the system will stop electric supply and will not come back on line until the device is restored. The process will be monitored via CCTV from MP pollution control board control room in Bhopal.