National Green Tribunal (NGT) member Ch.V. Ramachandramurthy urged industries to follow safety norms in letter and spirit to prevent accidents and save precious lives of workers and people living around those factories.
He said that companies can gather phone numbers of all the people living in the vicinity and send messages immediately whenever there was an accident and situation was out of control.
Mr. Ramachandramurthy, who is one of the members of the NGT’s fact-finding committee in LG Polymers gas leak incident, visited Sri Gurudeva Charitable Trust at Kothavalasa in Vizianagaram district on Sunday.
He congratulated the Trust founder Raparthi Jagadish Babu for providing shelter and food for gas leak victims for three days.
Speaking to The Hindu here, he said that LG Polymers India failed to check temperature in the old tank where styrene was stored. “The company staff used to check the temperature only in the bottom but failed to check at the highest point where temperature had gone to 150° Celsius within no time on the day of accident. There should be a mechanism to check temperature regularly at all levels of the tank since heat should not go up beyond 20° Celsius. The facility is there for new tank but such mechanism was ignored in case of the old tank. That too led to the accident,” said Mr. Ramachandramurthy.
He said that the NGT team headed by Justice B. Seshasayana Reddy had already inspected the LG Polymers unit at Venkatapuram of Visakhapatnam district and found many lapses which had led to major gas leak incident on May 7.
‘More suggestions’
“The NGT had already directed the company to deposit ₹50 crore as compensation. It would come up with more suggestions and recommendations which would benefit other industries with regard to safety norms,” he added. Mr. Ramachandra Murthy, who is former Principal of Andhra University Engineering College, asked college professors and students to study the gas leak incident thoroughly and understand importance of safety precautions in the industries.