One more day leave could have saved Harika

Vijayawada: The life of a young chemical engineer, C Harika, could have been saved from the recent industrial disaster in Anakapalli district if only the management of the pharma unit had been a little generous in giving her an extra day of leave that she had sought.

The 22-year-old woman engineer from Kakinada had recently gone home to celebrate Raksha Bandhan and wanted to stay back for one more day to attend a competitive examination on Wednesday but Escientia Advanced Sciences Pvt Ltd, which manufactures intermediate chemicals and active pharmaceutical ingredients (API), denied her the “luxury”, local reports said.

As fate would have it, she came back to work only to become a victim of the powerful vapour cloud explosion at 2.20 pm on August 21 in the pharma unit in Atchutapuram. She was one of the 17 people who perished, leaving her family in deep sorrow.

Harika had lost her father some years ago, and it’s reported that her older brother had abandoned the family. Despite these odds, she went on to study engineering, living with her mother and paternal grandmother. It’s only 11 months ago that she had joined the pharma unit, and on Wednesday she had to rush back after Raksha Bandhan celebrations at home to meet her tragic end at the pharma plant.

Family members, neighbours and locals mourned her loss and were inconsolable on receiving her body on Thursday, following a post-mortem examination.

Meanwhile, the relatives of other deceased victims and injured workers vented their anger against the tight-lipped management of the company for not notifying them about the disaster. “How can they not inform us? Did they hire these employees without interviews and taking their certificates? Where did the managing director go? Didn’t they take our (employees’) documents such as Aadhaar while joining?” thundered a frustrated woman while talking to a regional language news channel.

She questioned whether the management did not note the addresses of the employees while recruiting them and if it didn’t know how many employees were on shift and how many of them went missing. Amid the many workers present at the plant during the disaster were a few lucky ones who managed to escape the horrifying accident, and K Satyanarayana (30) from Eluru is one of them.

“I ate lunch and sat in the quality control (QC) department on the first floor. Then we heard a big sound as if something collapsed. Immediately, I went down and saw several people injured. I saw one man with severed hands,” Satyanarayana said.

Besides seeing several workers with bleeding injuries, he also noticed that all the equipment in the production laboratory located on the ground floor had fallen down and that the explosion had blown the second floor slab away.

Eager to escape, Satyanarayana, along with 11 others, tried to flee through the emergency exits but all of them were engulfed in fumes, prompting them to break a window on the third floor and raise an alarm to rescue them.

“After two hours, ladder vehicles were brought and all 11 of us were rescued around 4.30 pm. I am a QC executive, I do analysis. I joined the company only two months ago,” he said.

According to Satyanarayana, 400 people work in three shifts to run the unit 24x7. The management of the plant located on a 40-acre campus in the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation’s multi-product SEZ at the Atchutapuram cluster is believed to be based in the US.

Home minister Vangalapudi Anitha complained that the management had ignored her calls when she went to take stock of the inferno. Escientia Advanced Sciences commenced production in April 2019 with an investment of Rs 200 crore. (PTI)