Dwarfing the BP Oil Spill: Bhopal, by Sanjay Lohar
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
Sunil, one of the many victims of the Bhopal tragedy, sits back and reminesces.
Dec. 2, 1984 is coming to a close, routine checks are being done at the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in the city of Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. The personnel are hardly qualified to carry out the checks, products of cost-cutting moves by the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) based in the United States. The plant uses the gas methyl-isocyanate (MIC) as part of the production process, this gas is highly toxic and reacts strongly to liquid water. The MIC is supposed to be stored in drums, but it is instead stored in large tanks. The tanks have alarms that warn of any leaking or other failures, these alarms had not worked since 1980.
There are several pipe leaks on the facility, something which is ignored by the higher up when it’s reported. Several key safeguards are offline. At about 10:00 PM, water enters one of these tanks. The reaction is immediate, the poisonous chemicals begin to escape from the tanks and into the surrounding air. The scrubbers, that were supposed to remove some of these harmful chemicals, have not been functioning for several months. Read the rest of this entry »
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