It rains poop on Bengal village; plane leak likely

Shubhadeep Choudhury                                                               

Tribune News Service                                                                      

Kolkata, October 14

A mysterious ice chunk dropping in a West Bengal village from the sky could be sewage leaked from the toilet of an aircraft that flew above the village.

“Most likely, the ice chunk is human waste leaked from the lavatory of an aircraft. We have sent the material for testing,” said Prabir Mondal, additional director general of Geological Survey of India (GSI). If the test results do prove the substance to be sewage leaking out of an aircraft, this will be the second such incident in the recorded history of aviation in India.

The first incident took place in December, when a 60-year-old woman suffered a shoulder injury after a football-sized chunk of ice fell on her from the sky in Sagar district of MP. Waste leaking out of the lavatory is in a liquid state but gets frozen because of the low temperatures of the altitude at which airplanes fly.

Bhaskar Mukherjee, Superintendent of Police of North 24 Parganas in West Bengal, said the ice chunk, blue in colour, came crashing down on the courtyard of a house in Pakdaha village in Shasan police station area  on Thursday morning. “A GSI team came and collected the sample. We are now waiting for a report from them”, Mukherjee said.

TV footage showed picture of the ice chunk taken by villagers with their mobile phone cameras. Live footage showed the ice — melted and transformed into blue water — kept in polythene bag by a villager. The blue colour comes from disinfectant used in the lavatories.