VIJAYAWADA: The Human Rights Forum (HRF) has demanded that the chemical plant of Porus Laboratories located in Akkireddigudem village in Musunuru mandal, Eluru district, where a blast occurred on the night of April 13 that resulted in the death of six workers, be shut down permanently.
“We call for criminal prosecution of management of the company and officials of regulatory bodies for criminal negligence. The government and the company should make immediate arrangements for sending migrant workers from Bihar numbering around 50 back home, as per their request,” HRF leaders NN Srinivas Rao and G Rohit said in a press release.
A two-member HRF team visited the village on April 16 and interacted with villagers, families of victims, employees and former employees of the plant to ascertain facts. “On the night of the incident when the reactors and chiller system were functioning, there was power loss. A continuous supply of brine solution at minus 16 degree Celsius from the chiller system to reactors is essential. When the power went off, the workers tried to power the system using alternative arrangements only to realise that the batteries needed to be charged. By that time, a reactor heated up and went into flames,” the HRF leaders said.
They added that there was no distributed control and monitoring system in place to monitor the temperature and pressure round the clock. There were no alternate power systems in place. There was neither automatic detection nor blockage systems in place whose presence might have averted the disaster.