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Fire at Indag; TNPCB not to be found
_ Cuddalore, 20 May 2006: A fire at the premises
of the now-abandoned Coromandel Indag factory in SIPCOT, Cuddalore,
spread thick white smoke and panic among local residents. Lakshmi (35), wife of Rajiv,
reportedly fainted, upon which the villagers alerted the SIPCOT Area
Community Environmental Monitors. Lakshmi was
admitted to Surendra Hospital. The breeze blowing from the Southeast to the
Northwest carried the smoke from the fire as far away as the Cuddalore Old Town, about 3 km away.
SACEM
estimates that the fire started at around 4.30 p.m.
“It was very less at the time, and not many people knew. There was
not much of a flame. There was a low blue flame, but a lot of smoke. There
was an acid-like smell. We couldn’t go near the smoke,” said
SIPCOT monitor S. Ramanathan,
who reached the spot by 6 p.m. and
alerted the Fire Services. The fire tenders that arrived by 8 p.m. eventually put the fire out by 9 p.m. SACEM has taken an air sample using the bucket.
According to
Ramanathan, the Fire Service personnel were
hesitant to use water because they did not know the nature of the chemical
that was burning and did not want to aggravate the situation. TNPCB
Assistant Engineer said he was on leave, and the District Environmental
Engineer was not reachable. The factory is under lock-out, and the premises
are under the control of the Court. A police complaint has been filed.
Besides Indag, hazardous wastes are stored in several other
closed units including JK Pharma, Maruti Synthetics, Oswali
Chemicals, Maruti Labs, Kumaran
Carbonates, Pentafour and Tamilnadu
Pigments. As early as in January, 2005, SACEM brought the matter of
hazardous wastes stored in SIPCOT factories to the notice of the Supreme
Court Monitoring Committee and the Tamilnadu
Pollution Control Board. But no action has been taken on the matter by
either.
A copy of the report titled “Groundtruths” is available at:
http://www.sipcotcuddalore.com/downloads/SCMC_report_submission_Jan2005.pdf
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