Google, YouTube to the rescue at Mumbai port
July 16, 2010 |15:49 | You Tube News By : Team X
It took emergency officials over five hours to figure out that the mysterious gas leaking from a container at Mumbai Port Trust early on Wednesday was chlorine. But they had had no training on tackling the leak. So they did the next best thing they could: they Googled “how to manage chlorine leak”.
The search threw up links to several documents and the officials — working out of Lal Bahadur Shastri College of Advanced Maritime Studies and Research, just across the wall from the chlorine containers — began poring over them, sources told The Indian Express.
Just as they realised they were taking too much time the gas had made scores sick the officials stumbled upon something else on the Web. It was a YouTube video of a 1996 chlorine leak on an island in the United States. They watched the video, made notes, and began to discuss how they could put it to use in the crisis at hand. Luckily for them, at 11.30 am, more than eight hours after the leak sprouted, the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), finally arrived on the scene and took charge of the operation, said an official.
It took the NDRF, which is trained to deal with chemical accidents, another 20 hours to neutralize the five cylinders of chlorine that had been lying at the port for years. A day later, officials from several agencies reviewed the first response to the accident and admitted that they had been caught off-guard.
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