The Bhopal gas disaster made headlines 25 years ago as the world's largest chemical disaster, a deadly leak of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas from a Union Carbide pesticide plant injuring half a million people, killing 22,000, disabling another 1,50,000. Subsequently, it was largely remembered as a tragic, but isolated event.
But disasters proliferate. They reproduce. Every famous disaster has its less-famous parents, it has offspring that are yet to hit the big time.
Three years before the great gas leak, on December 25, 1981, the same chemical plant in Bhopal leaked enough phosgene to kill one worker at the plant and grievously injure two. A month later, on January 9, 1982, a second leak put 25 more workers in hospital. But worker deaths are never taken seriously. On October 5, 1982, the immediate parent of the big gas disaster manifested itself as a leak that released enough MIC, hydrochloric acid and chloroform to hospitalise many members of nearby residential communities.
Union Carbide's response to these disasters was to fire workers who highlighted this issue, ignore the finding of 61 safety hazards by its own internal safety audit team, and rewrite its safety manuals to permit more lax standards.
Union Carbide's documents demonstrate that the company designed the plant with 'untested' technology and compromised safety in order to save up to $8 million. While comparable factories in Europe were equipped with automatic safety devices and computerised early warning systems, the plant in Bhopal relied on manual detection and had no emergency planning measures in place. When Union Carbide's cost-cutting led to its laying off more than half its staff and drastically reducing the duration of safety training, that element of manual oversight was dangerously weakened.
In addition, Union Carbide was saving on the costs of refrigerating the tanks, a necessary measure to contain this highly volatile liquid. Finally, one night, a leaky pressure valve enabled a deadly reaction between water and MIC, whose toxic gas products burst through the undersized tanks and on to half a million residents of Bhopal. None of the six safety systems that could have prevented a leak were functional that night, and the factory's alarm had been turned off. The history of the Bhopal gas disaster is a shocking reminder of the human and monetary costs of corporate strategies of maximising short-term profits.
The overnight toll was estimated to be 8,000-15,000 deaths. It is estimated that exposure to the gas on that deadly night kills a person every day in Bhopal even these days, 25 years later, and that at least 50,000 people are still too disabled to earn a living. People have suffered from chronic respiratory, digestive and circulatory ailments over the years. The community has an extremely elevated rate of cancers, menstrual disorders and birth defects. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported the effects of toxins on the children of those exposed to the gas, including being born with fused fingers, splayed limbs, spina bifida, respiratory weakness, skin disorders and a dizzying array of symptoms of mental damage.
After an initial claim that the gas leaked was merely tear gas, Union Carbide changed its stance and refused to reveal information on the composition of the leaked gas to avoid associated liabilities, making treatment of victims tricky and hazardous. More unfortunately, a doctor employed by Union Carbide recommended a treatment that had been proven effective in double blind clinical trials, only to withdraw that recommendation in the presence of Union Carbide's lawyers, upon which widespread use of that treatment ceased.
Meanwhile, the Bhopal gas disaster gave birth to a Bhopal water disaster. Union Carbide turned tail and abandoned the factory after the accident, leaving behind tonnes of toxic material held within the factory that added to the deadly chemicals it had already been dumped into the soil in and around the factory. Assorted poisons and heavy metals were found in samples of soil and water.
Legally speaking, Union Carbide's strategy has been to dodge all liability and claim that an unnamed saboteur played mischief in the factory. Although the Indian government settled its civil suit against the company, Union Carbide and its CEO at the time of the disaster, Warren Anderson, are to this day considered absconders from justice by the government for ignoring court summons and refusing to face criminal charges of culpable homicide.
In 2001, Dow Chemical acquired Union Carbide. While it set aside $2.2 billion for Union Carbide's liabilities for asbestos exposure in the US, it refused to even acknowledge its liabilities in Bhopal. A denial of its liabilities goes against Indian, US and international corporate laws. The monetary and logistical responsibility for a full clean up of the factory site, just compensation and medical monitoring for the survivors of all of Union Carbide's toxic waste, as well as legal responsibility in the criminal case in India now lies with Dow Chemical.
(The author has just obtained a doctoral degree from Harvard University in computational neuroscience)