Lessons Learned After Worst Industrial Accident In History Of India; Darwins Theories Spark New Controversy In Schools
DANIEL SIEBERG, CNN ANCHOR: Hi, I'm Daniel Sieberg. Today on NEXT@CNN it's been 20 years since the worst industrial accident took thousands of people in India. We'll look at the lessons learned and not learned. TV viewers who hate commercials love TiVo, but how will you feel when the digital video recorder starts putting even more ads on their TV screens? And nearly 150 years after Darwin published the case for revolution, the concept creates new controversy in schools across the country. All that and more on NEXT. Twenty years ago this week, a gas leak occurred at an union carbide fertilizer plant in India. More than 20,000 people died. Thousands more are still suffering. As Satinder Bindra reports, many feel that few lessons have been learned from the tragedy.</s>SATINDER BINDRA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Twenty years, paints the pain of struggle and demand for justice. Since 1984, the population has tripled. One million people now live here. The town has grown. But few have forgotten this is where the world's worst industrial accident happened. Memorials dot the city's landscape, it seems the city can never move on. the morning of December 3rd, 1984, tons of the highly toxic metalized osinyde (ph) gas leaked from a fertilizer plant the gas spread quickly. Within moments, tens of thousands of people were gasping and screaming for air. It is estimated within the first 24 hours alone, some 3,000 people were killed. Many are buried here. Three or four to a grave. Hospitals could barely cope with the survivors. In the months that followed, thousands more perished. The tragedy ultimately claiming more than 20,000 lives. More than 500,000 survivors, about half the population, still feel a similar sense of helplessness. They crowd into hospitals. Too old to work and plagued by nervous disorders, these victims have almost given up on life. But supporting them, caring for them and providing regular counseling is another victim herself. Rashida Bee. Bee tells me six members of her family including her father were killed by the after effects of the gas.</s>RASHIDA BEE, SURVIVOR (translator): Today, the situation of Bohal (ph) is even more grave than it was that night. Those who died because of the gas were very fortunate. The unfortunate are still living. They're like the living dead.</s>BINDRA: 21-year-old Ansar Amed (ph) was just a few months old when he inhaled the gas. Five years ago, he stopped walking and talking and now is completely dependent on his mother for care.</s>JABEEN KAUSAR, MOTHER OF THE VICTIM (translator): I can't say what I feel. I feel that God should take me away right now. Either make my son all right or just kill us all.</s>BINDRA: But killing is still continuing warn environmentalists pointing to this plant that still hasn't been cleaned up. As I walk through I notice tons of poisonous chemicals everywhere. Soil samples taken from here show toxic materials have leached underground contaminating the water supply. The local government now trucks in water for residents. But people are still using polluted water for their household chores and some even admit drinking it. When clean water finishes, we drink this water, says this woman. Environmental groups say it will cost about $30 million to clean up this plant. But union carbide says it has no further liability after it paid victims of $470 million out of court settlement in 1989. The company also says what happened here was no accident but a deliberate act of sabotage.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There is no question in the mind of union carbide that a disgruntled employee who introduced a large amount of water into the tank of methal licesiniade (ph) was responsible for causing the run away reaction.</s>BINDRA: A claim that many including the Indian government says is irrelevant. The local government now says it will remove all this hazardous waste. Environmentalists complain it's already too late. They say thousands of children are now being born with birth defects.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Something that poisoned and killed so many people continues to poison lives and nobody seems to care is the biggest tragedy.</s>BINDRA: As she puts the posters informing victims where to get the last batch of compensation, Bee feels they haven't learned lessons from</s>BEE (translator): Slowly, the world is moving towards death and in the world every day, somewhere, Bohal (ph) gets repeated. In a small way, but Bohal (ph) is repeated.</s>BINDRA: Victims</s>SIEBERG: Well a new study on another environmental disaster this. One is the deadly heat wave that swept Europe in August a year ago. Mari Ramos (ph) has that story.</s>MARI RAMOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Europe's hot summer of 2003 ignited heated debates over the last year as everyone searched for answers to explain the killer season. Officials believe inadequate infrastructure, scientists sited record temperatures. And the public felt that poor planning lead to the deaths of thousands across the continent. But a recent study published in the journal "Nature" sheds new light on the topic and questions whether man made pollutants like cold fire plants, auto emission and other green house gases helped to spark the sizzling summer temperatures that topped 110.</s>MYLES ALLEN, OXFORD UNIVERSITY: What we found was that past green house gas emissions, past human influence on climate increased the risk of a heat wave by at least a factor of 2. Probably more like a facture of 4.</s>RAMOS (ph): Authors of the report say their conclusion support the findings of meeting climate change models but their study goes one step further by showing a link between green house gas emissions and the specific weather related disaster. They compared European atmospheric records and other studies that spanned a 150 to 400-year period. From that, they developed a model that looked at both the influence of green house gases on the record temperatures and what the European climates would have been last summer if human activities were not a factor. Their findings indicate 2003 was the hottest European summer in more than 400 years. The study not only warns man-made pollution contributed largely to this natural disaster, it more than doubles the risk that heat waves like this will happen again.</s>ALLEN: What we see is that by the middle of the century, 2003 would actually be a normal summer. By the end of the century, 2003 would be an exceptionally cold summer. So that puts the whole change in context.</s>RAMOS (ph): Beyond the science, researchers say their findings have legal and economic applications. Draughts during the heat wave cost billions in crop losses and electricity prices soared. Alpine ice melted and forest fires burned through more than a billion dollars in Portugal alone. The researchers say that in time studies like theirs could help governments, businesses and the public recoup some of the losses from global warming. By identifying all the factors that contributed to a weather-related disaster and making the primary polluters pay their share of the cost of climate change.</s>SIEBERG: All right moving on now to a mysterious stranding of whales and dolphins in Austria and New Zealand this week. In Australia, authorities and volunteers worked to save dozens of pilot whales and bottle nosed dolphins which beached themselves on two different islands. Some 100 died. But a few dozen others were saved. Across the Tazman Sea in New Zealand, dozens more of the marine mammals swam ashore and died. As most strandings, authorities aren't sure why the animals beached themselves. Some say the fact that this happened at the same time in two separate countries is probably just a coincidence.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Next up, a device that lets you take your TV connection with you wherever you go. And later, art, that's a snap snot of American mass consumption.