It was some presence of mind on the part of the police and a little help from a You Tube video that prevented the chlorine leak at the Bombay Port Trust on early Wednesday morning from turning into a full-scale disaster, reports Mumbai Mirror.
Before a team of the National Disaster Response Force arrived from Pune at 11.30 am, it was just a bunch of police officers, some firemen and a professor from the Institute of Chemical Technology dealing with the situation.
To their credit, they did a damn good job of it.The leak was first detected by a constable at 3 am.
By 4 am, both the police and the fire brigade were at the spot. The police's priority was to evacuate the premises and then cordon it off.
That done, the fire brigade was instructed to spray water on the leaking cylinders. Most gases being soluble in water, they knew this would help.
Nobody, at that point, had an idea which cylinder in a heap of around 100 was leaking. “We asked the fire brigade to cover them all,” a police officer said.
This continued till 6.30 am when Police Commissioner Sanjeev Dayal informed DCP Quaisar Khalid of Port Zone that a chemical expert would be at the spot soon.
A senior inspector had suggested the name of Professor Bhaskar N Thorat of the Institute of Chemical Technology. The senior inspector's daughter is Professor Thorat's student.
Professor Thorat was woken up by DCP Sanjay Baviskar at 6.45 am and ferried from his Matunga home to the spot in a dog safety vehicle.
“There was so much happening at that time. There was no time to look for suitable vehicles,” said the officer.
Professor Thorat arrived at the spot at around 7.15 am. He got off the vehicle, sniffed the air and exclaimed, “chlorine”.
By then, in the absence of clear answers, DCP Khalid had fished out a You Tube video that showed how US had neutralised chlorine in 1996 on an island.
The solution was caustic soda. Thorat approved of it. “We had got information from doctors treating those affected by the gas that the symptoms suggested chlorine inhalation. So we had started some research on our own,” said the officer.
Close to 150 kg caustic soda was brought from the nearby Godrej Vegetable Oil Mill.
“A constable told us about its availability there. Cops often used it to clean their weapons,” said the officer.
Thorat made a solution of caustic soda which reacts with chlorine and forms bleaching powder. “I asked the fire brigade to spray it in the area so that leakage is contained,” he said.
By 9.30 am the gas leakage had been contained enough for the authorities to declare that the situation was under control.
The next job was to identify the amount of chlorine at the site and the leaking cylinder.
“We asked BPT officials about it, but they had no idea. We had to then physically count the cylinders and estimate the amount of chlorine,” said the officer.
Around 11.30 am, 45 members of NDRF arrived at the spot with all the necessary protective and neutralising equipment.
Several methods of neutralising the cylinders were discussed, including leaking the cylinders in the sea, sealing them or the caustic soda treatment.
“By this time we had learnt that it was a consignment of empty cylinders and only some had gas. Thus, it was decided that all the cylinders would be weighed and whichever was found heavier would be neutralised. The segregation process ended at 6.30 pm and we found six of them containing over 900 kg of gas each,” said the officer.
The team then got two tankers of caustic soda solution from Century Rayon in Kalyan. Chlorine was passed through the solution by attaching a regulator and a pipe to the cylinders to neutralise the gas. The process will continue for another day, said the police.
