The Disaster That Changed It All
DEVELOPMENTS
It was the stuff of nightmares. Early morning on December 3rd, 1984, as an entire community slept their homes were invaded by a silent, lethal foe. Before daylight thousands would perish in a “blinding, vomiting, lung-searing hell.” People trampled each other in their rush to escape, leaving the streets littered with the dead.
The Bhopal Gas Tragedy is regarded as the worst industrial accident in history. It was caused by the release of a deadly cloud of methyl isocyanate gas, or MIC, from the American-owned Union Carbide pesticide plant into the crowded Indian city of Bhopal. Those who weren’t felled immediately were struck with a variety of ailments, including blindness and chronic respiratory problems.
Although safety regulations around the world have improved since 1984, as the Gulf oil spill and Japan’s nuclear crisis have shown, environmental disasters still occur. Have we truly learned from Bhopal?
BACKGROUND
India in the eighties was much like it is today – crowded, chaotic and constrained by a high poverty rate. But twenty years ago, bureaucratic red tape reduced foreign investment in the country to an all-time low. As a result of a robust pesticide market, Union Carbide India Limited, or UCIL, an Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide, was one of the few international companies to continue doing business in the country, despite these restrictions.
During this time, Bhopal, located in the heart of India, was part of a region considered significantly underdeveloped. The city had a population of over 700,000 packed into an area approximately the size of Little Rock, Arkansas. (For reference, Little Rock has less than one-third of the population today that Bhopal had in the eighties). To encourage development, industries were offered federal and state tax breaks and other inducements to set up shop in the state. Sometime in the sixties, UCIL chose to build a pesticide plant in Bhopal because of its central location and convenient rail transport facilities. The plant was opened in 1969, and it manufactured the agricultural insecticide carbaryl sold under the brand name, Sevin. An essential ingredient of carbaryl was methyl isocyanate or MIC.
Barely twenty years later, however, reduced demand for pesticides forced the plant to operate at a much diminished capacity. UCIL sought a buyer for the plant and had planned to dismantle some key production units because the plant had already acquired a reputation for being unsafe. Local journalist, Raajkumar Keswani, wrote two newspaper articles warning of impending disaster. Bhopal, he noted, “was sitting on the edge of a volcano.” Below is an excerpt from one of his 1982 articles, as translated by the website http://old.studentsforbhopal.org:
“Accidents began in the plant from the time it started. Many accidents were covered up. On December 26, 1981 Mohammed Ashraf was killed due to leakage of Phosgene gas while he was working in the Carbon Monoxide plant. This situation continued and in January ‘82, Phosgene leaked once again during the visit of the President of the Agricultural Products Division of Union Carbide from USA that led to acute sickness of 24 persons who had to be hospitalized and for many months the workers suffered.”
There are conflicting stories of what occurred the night of the tragedy. But by all accounts, at around 11:00 p.m., water entered a storage tank containing 42 tons of MIC. The resulting reaction increased the pressure and heat within the tank until the safety valve gave way, releasing a plume of MIC into the environment. The rest, as the saying goes, made for horrific and heartbreaking history.
Union Carbide, to this day, claims that water was introduced into the tank deliberately suggesting sabotage, not carelessness, was the cause of the accident. The incident occurred shortly after the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards and the resulting massacre of the Sikh community by enraged mobs. Coincidently, Sikh extremists and a disgruntled employee were blamed for the alleged sabotage.
Other investigations, however, lay the blame on deteriorating safety conditions at the plant. Everything from unskilled employees, poor maintenance, failure of back-up and mitigation systems, and ineffective emergency response and planning were said to have contributed to compounding the scale of the disaster. For instance, emergency sirens were changed from full blast to mute for almost an hour after the release. By the time they were turned back on full volume, it was too late; a full blast siren during that precious initial hour might have alerted more people into moving out of harm’s way.
The aftermath of the incident was as chaotic as the incident itself. On its Bhopal website, Union Carbide, now a part of DOW Chemicals, has said that its response was immediate and effective. Nevertheless, faced with a $3 billion lawsuit, the company lawyered up; it would take five years of legal wrangling before the company settled with the Indian government for $470M in damages. The company was also required to build a 500 bed hospital in Bhopal from the proceeds it earned when it sold its 50.9 percent stake in UCIL to Eveready Industries in 1994. Union Carbide now consistently maintains that subsequent to these actions it has “fulfilled every responsibility and obligation it had in Bhopal.” It has claimed that NGOs and activists in India have repeatedly blocked remediation efforts and alleged that its $470 million settlement was not distributed until 2006 – and equaled $1.5 billion with interest.
Many others, however, believe that Union Carbide has tried to “manipulate, obfuscate and withhold scientific data to the detriment of victims.” There is still considerable angst among Indians that the company’s former CEO, Warren Anderson, was never prosecuted, despite being at the helm of the company during the disaster. Critics also point out that when Dow acquired Union Carbide in 2001, they settled Carbide’s asbestos liabilities in Texas for $2.2 billion. This has led many to question why American lives were valued at so much higher a price than Indian lives.
In June 2010, twenty-five years after the disaster, an Indian court convicted seven former Indian Union Carbide officials of negligence for their role in the tragedy. The former employees, all of whom are out on bail, were sentenced to two years in prison and fined a little more than $2,200 each.
ANALYSIS
The Bhopal gas tragedy, whether by virtue of it being one of the first industrial accidents or its occurrence in a poor, developing country, presents a depressing picture at best.
If there is a silver lining to this tragedy, it is that the incident changed safety standards and emergency planning across industries. It spurred many countries, including India and the U.S., to strengthen environmental justice and protection laws. The chemical industry started the “Responsible Care” initiative, which aims to improve their “environmental, health, safety and security performance.” The ghost of Bhopal has also played a strong role in influencing the Indian government’s policies on a number of issues, including the recent nuclear liability law.
—
Aarti Ramachandran works in the energy industry and is also a blogger for the Foreign Policy Association. The opinions expressed in this article are solely that of the author’ and should not be attributed to any other party.
