Toxic gas has begun leaking again from a factory owned by LG Chem in southern India's Visakhapatnam, an official says, triggering a wider evacuation after at least 11 people were killed following a leak from the site on the previous day.
"The situation is tense," district fire officer N Surendra Anand told Reuters early on Friday, adding people in a 5-kilometre radius of the factory were being moved out.
Hours earlier, authorities had said that the situation was under control at the plant on the outskirts of Visakhapatnam, where a leak early on Thursday sickened hundreds of people.
The factory is operated by LG Polymers, a unit of South Korea's biggest petrochemical maker LG Chem Ltd.
People carry a woman affected by a chemical gas leak in Vishakhapatnam, India, Thursday, May 7, 2020. Source: AP
The commissioner of the Visakhapatnam city corporation said styrene leaked from the plant during the early hours of the morning, when families in the surrounding villages were asleep.
Srijana Gummalla, commissioner of the Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation, told Reuters that the plant had been reopened in the past few days after India relaxed a nationwide lockdown imposed on 25 March to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
Swarupa Rani, an assistant commissioner of police in Visakhapatnam told Reuters that at least nine people had died and between 300 and 400 were hospitalised. Another 1,500 people had been evacuated, mostly from a neighbouring village.
Local revenue official BV Rani said she got a call at around 4am on Thursday from a panicking police sub-inspector near the facility. "He asked me to come to the spot immediately," Ms Rani told Reuters.
When Ms Rani went there, she saw people had collapsed unconscious in the village adjoining the plant.
"I personally helped more than 15 people get to an ambulance who had tried to run away from the village but dropped down a few metres away," she said.
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