Bhopal: The Truth is that Design flaws can be repeated

Debora MacKenzie, writes about the truth behind the Bhopal disaster and the cycnical disregard for human suffering that resulted.

Early on 3 December 1984, I was in my office in Geneva, Switzerland, when the BBC World Service started reporting a chemical accident in India. I got on the phone to every chemical engineer I knew.

The following week, New Scientist reported that the Bhopal disaster was probably due to a runaway chemical reaction in a tank of methyl isocyanate (MIC) that the plant's safety systems weren't designed to contain - even though their designer, US chemical giant Union Carbide, knew these reactions could happen (New Scientist, 13 December 1984, p 3).

It took a week. A measly week. The technical facts and issues were not difficult, arcane, or secret. Everything I have seen since has confirmed that story.

Yet ever since, Union Carbide and its successor, Dow Chemical, have denied responsibility, by claiming the accident was beyond their power to predict or prevent. They have never convinced me or others. In March 1985, Union Carbide's own report confirmed the runaway reaction and showed how it could have started when water washed into the tank through a faulty valve (New Scientist, 28 March 1985, p 3) - a hypothesis later confirmed by union investigators. Former Carbide engineers confirmed the safety system was 10 times too small (New Scientist, 11 April 1985, p 4). Carbide even seems to have admitted the plant's safety systems could not have coped.

It is 25 years since that plant blew. According to some estimates, tens of thousands have died - and according to a scientific analysis out this week (PDF) thousands more are still being poisoned. The company has never been properly held to account for the design errors that led to the deaths.

Instead Carbide, then Dow, hired PR people - experienced ones - and maintained that the water got into that tank by sabotage.

There has never been any evidence offered for the sabotage tale. Nor any real refutation of the rather easier explanation: a pipe washed a few hours before the accident could have fed water into the MIC tank.

But it doesn't matter how the water got there. If a chemical plant wants to keep a huge tank of highly dangerous MIC around, it is supposed to forestall the lethal effects of foreseeable hazards like some water getting into it. The Carbide plant in Bhopal was designed in the US by people who knew this risk and designed their US plant accordingly - but not the one in Bhopal.

But the sabotage explanation has been swallowed. As a result, the design of the plant, and the people who designed it, have not been held responsible for the disaster. This is bad for two reasons.

The first is practical: if the designers had been held responsible, the case would have been tried in the US, and the pay-out would have been greater. The companies have paid some money towards helping survivors and cleaning the site, but nowhere near enough - the site remains heavily polluted and medical research into treatment for survivors has been limited and under-funded.

The other reason this is important, even after 25 years, is that it would focus more attention on making chemical plants safer. The bulk chemicals industry is increasingly located in fast-industrialising countries like India, as this report from the OECD, the club of rich nations, notes (pdf). In 2001, the OECD was already warning that "there needs to be a greater focus on the chemical safety infrastructure in non-OECD countries".

The risk of unsafe chemical plants is real. There may not have been another Bhopal in the past 25 years, but lots of little accidents still kill a lot of people even in countries with strict safety laws, and the risk of another big one remains. The experts say there was some improvement in process safety after Bhopal, but it's been slow and spotty.

To mark the 25th anniversary of Bhopal, US chemical and steel workers unions and Greenpeace pointed out that chemical companies in the US, never mind India or China, can still dodge safety requirements in designing plants, and the design flaws that led to Bhopal can be repeated. There hasn't been another Bhopal, but maybe we've been lucky.

Chemical companies need to be responsible for possible design flaws that cause chemical plants to kill. One way to get that accountability is for independent investigators, including journalists, to find out why accidents happen.

Yet I found back in the 1980s that industry reporters were scared to follow up the technical reasons for Bhopal, because they were scared of the science. Given what's happening to science reporting, will this improve?