Five Past Midnight in Bhopal.pdf

Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World's Deadliest Industrial Disaster is a book by Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro based on the 1984 Bhopal disaster. It was first published in 1997 and the English edition was published in 2001.


The authors researched the book by living in Bhopal for three years in the late 1990s. They interviewed people from India and United States, who were witnesses and participants. The book starts by following a group of rural immigrants who traveled to Bhopal to escape the drought in their own villages and settled in the slums. The books also chronicles the invention of American firm Union Carbide's chemical pesticide, Sevin, which used methyl isocyanate and α-naphthol.

The book details the disaster which killed between 15000 to 30000. The narration follows characters like Padmini, a Oriya girl, who was to be married the night of the disaster in the slums, and Sister Felicity, a missionary from Scotland. The book also describes other characters like a tradesman who hired tents to offer some protection against the poison cloud and the railway station warden who tried to stop a train from halting there.

The final chapter follows the aftermath of the disaster. It tracks the people involved in the event, notably Warren Anderson, the chairman of Union Carbide at the time, and Warren Woomer, the supervisor of the factory in Bhopal.