Bhopal: Where The World's Deadliest Industrial Disaster Took Place

23°16′51″N 77°24′38″E

   In 1984, the Indian city of Bhopal suffered world's biggest and deadliest industrial disaster ever. Thousands of Bhopalis awoke from their sleep when a highly toxic gas called methyl isocyanate leaked from a local pesticide plant, killing instantly 3000 people and disabling hundreds of thousands for the rest of their lives. The night silence suddenly turned into a chaos filled by screams, coughs and sobs of desperate inhabitants, whilst the only thing the chemical workers could do was to watch silently as the gas slowly invaded the buildings. Today in Blind Witnesses, the horrific gas tragedy of Bhopal.

 

   Our story begins with three friends and automobile freaks who lived on the outskirts of Indianapolis. One of them had the idea of equipping cars with driving lights, something which seemed very far-fetched for the era, but which would later form part to our day-to-day life thanks to a special gas called acetylene. So they got down to work and created the company Prest-O-Lite, which had enormous success. Roughly a decade later, the friends went their separate ways, but the company reached even higher prestige when it merged with the equally innovative National Carbon Company and the Linden Air Products Company to form the Union Carbide Corporation, which would enter history as the pioneer of modern petrochemical industry, but also with the Bhopal disaster.

Union Carbide gas lightning propaganda poster, year 1922 (from Wikimedia Commons)

   In the 1970s, Union Carbide founded a pesticide plant in Bhopal, as the Indian government promised to invest in foreign industrial companies to increase their economy. Yet, the subcontinent was suffering a critical amount of crop losses, so that the farmers couldn't afford buying pesticides. Therefore, the production at the plant decreased and it already had plans for relocating it to another country.  Yet, the 3rd of December of 1984 came, when the lack of well-functioning machinery, the ignorance of some protocols and the many human mistakes produced the famous gas tragedy.

   That night, the few workers that remained in the plant already noticed the leak around midnight. However, the supervisor decided to take a look at it later --- after the tea break --- as he mistakenly assumed that it wasn't a serious problem. Therefore, after an hour, the reaction went out of control and the methyl isocyanate started expanding itself. Immediately, the operators tried to displace the gas from the leaked tank to a reserve tank, still, this wasn't possible as the reserve tank wasn't empty like it should be. From that time on, they knew nothing could prevent the substance from free expansion and that Bhopal had to be evacuated; but a new wave of errors wouldn't permit it. At first, many workers ran for their lives without telling residents, secondly, the ones who remained in the building did activate an alarm sound, however it turned out to be useless as it was identical to the sound of weekly practice drills. 40 tons of methyl isocyanate were released into the atmosphere.

Photo taken just some months after this thing killed thousands of people (from Wikimedia Commons)

   The inhabitants of slums and poor neighborhoods were the ones who got the worst part, due to its proximity with the industrial park. Residents were sleeping peacefully when they started coughing, their eyes teared, and the whole body itched. Soon, the dark landscape was illuminated by several lights which were switched on. People ran to the streets yelling, while the rooms were filled with gas clouds. Meanwhile, staff at the near train station also noticed the first signs of the disaster, and the stationmasters who were on duty succeeded in the hard role of evacuating men, women and children (Later, Netflix would do a movie of these unknown heroes). Luckily, the gas reached the rich neighborhoods with delay, so these zones were alerted at time. Nevertheless, 3000 people had already died and 500,000 harmed, both psychologically and/or physically (Statements of some of them).

The "Bhopal Disaster Girl", one of the best conserved victims (from Hindustan Times)

  Unsurprisingly, the next days felt like hell for Union Carbide Corporation. Brought to court, they initially tried to blame the local  subsidiary. Then, they came up with alleged theories of disgruntled employees or Sikh extremist groups. Yet, they would soon ran out of excuses and the courts held them responsible for all this chaos. As a punishment, Indian authorities would briefly detain the CEO Warren Anderson, but in the end, both sides agreed on a fee of 470 Million dollars instead. Nowadays, the company still exists, but is by far not as popular and was eventually acquired by the more powerful The Dow Chemical Company.

   In what concerns present-day Bhopal, it features a memorial statue and the Remember Bhopal Museum. The memorial shows a woman hiding her face behind one hand, and holding a crying baby in the other one, awakening those nightmares again.

Bhopal Memorial Statue (from Wikimedia Commons)

Sources and Picture Credits:

Sources: NIH, Smithsonian Magazine, CBS News, First Super Speedway, The New York Times

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (Learn more)

Picture 1 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:J_budissin

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Picture 2 https://www.flickr.com/people/51096110@N00 (Don O'Brien)

Picture 3 https://www.flickr.com/photos/bhopalmedicalappeal/ (Bhopal Medical Appeal)

Picture 5: Wikimedia user Simone Lippi