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?
Showing posts with label compensation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label compensation. Show all posts
Friday, December 4, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
Bhopal gas survivors mark 25 years of agony
Livestock outnumber humans at the Arif Nagar slum, a toxic wasteyard next to the site of the world's worst industrial accident, which occurred 25 years ago this week in the Indian city of Bhopal. While the animals are blissfully unaware of their poisoned surroundings, residents are bitter whenever they glance behind their homes towards the old Union Carbide factory, where a lethal plume of gas escaped from a storage tank in the early hours of December 3, 1984, killing thousands instantly.
Arif Nagar and other destitute neighbourhoods around the plant became a graveyard as residents choked to death on more than 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate -- the raw material used to make the pesticide carbaryl.
"I started frothing from the mouth, my eyes were huge and red. I thought I was going to die," said Hamid Khan, 70, who watched his two children die in the disaster and whose skin and organs are racked with infections to this day.
Khan was a day labourer at the time, but -- like many living in the vicinity -- the effects of the gas and years of exposure to contaminated water and soil left him too weak to do regular work.
Government figures put the death tollat 3,500 within the first three days but independent data by the state-run Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) puts the figure at between 8,000 and 10,000 for the same period.
"There were people falling, hundreds of them lying on the street vomiting, unconscious, convulsing," said N.R. Bhandari, who in 1984 was medical superintendent of one of the main hospitals in Bhopal and also led research for the ICMR.
Survivors say the anniversary marks another year of physical and psychological trauma compounded by government and corporate negligence.
Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide in 1999, but says all liabilities related to the accident were cleared in a 470 million dollar out of court settlement with the Indian government in 1989.
Calling the event a "terrible tragedy that understandably continues to evoke strong emotions even 25 years later" the company says it "worked diligently to provide aid to the victims and set up a process to resolve their claims."
It insists the leak was caused by an unidentified act of sabotage and emphasises that the state government, which took control of the site 10 years ago, is now responsible for the tonnes of toxic waste yet to be cleared up.
Activists and victims reacted furiously when Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, visiting the compound earlier this year, held a clump of soil in his hand and declared he was still healthy.
"The government is so insensitive, it has no idea what is happening to our children," said Mamta Sen, as she held her six-year-old mentally challenged son Sandeep.
The ICMR conducted research on the health effects of the disaster until the central government ordered it to stop in 1994. Most of the research was never published, which Bhandari calls a "criminal scientific waste."
"Bureaucrats don't understand medical things and yet they want to dominate everywhere," he said. "The studies should have been continued to see the long-term effects of the leak."
Survivors suffer from ailments such as respiratory and kidney problems, hormonal imbalances, mental illness and cancer, and new generations have not been spared from the polluted groundwater and poisonous breastmilk fed to them from birth.
To this day, children are born grotesquely disfigured, with webbed hands and feet, weak immune systems, stunted growth, and congenital disorders, like 10-year-old Vikas who cannot stand or walk due to his spindly legs.
He beams and opens his mouth wide eager to speak, but the only sound that comes out is a high-pitched gurgle.
Twenty-seven-year-old Raj Kumari's height is also stunted. Her belly juts out as though she is pregnant, but her mother tells AFP she gave birth recently.
"She is sick from the gas and the water. The bump has been growing for months but the doctors say it will go away," said her mother Leela Bai.
The compensation doled out to survivors by the government -- between 1,000 to 2,000 dollars each -- has dried up after years of paying for the long-term health impact of the disaster.
ICMR research showed that 25,000 people have died from the consequences of exposure since 1984. After that research concluded, government statistics said 100,000 people were chronically sick, with more than 30,000 people living in water-contaminated areas.
Instead of the slums around the plant becoming a ghost town, victims -- mostly day labourers and migrants from outside Bhopal -- flocked to squat on the swampy land surrounding the factory, sometimes even buying it at cheap prices.
Although the government has set up new pipelines to connect residents to clean drinking water, the supply is infrequent and they often rely on archaic handpumps that spout dirty water.
"If the government supply doesn't fill up the tank we have no choice but to drink the groundwater, even though we know it makes us sick," said Sisupal Yadav as he lifted up his shirt to display a rash.
Survivors were furious when the government of Madhya Pradesh state, of which Bhopal is capital, announced plans to open the old factory to curious visitors keen to witness the scene of such tragedy. Last week it reversed its decision.
Inside the building, dozens of bottles of chemicals are still stocked in the factory's lab, covered in dust and cobwebs and surrounded by broken glass.
Emergency instructions and a sticker reading "safety is everybody's business" still hang on the wall, and families and cattle wander by.
Criminal cases against former Union Carbide executives are pending in various Indian courts to force them and Dow to take more responsibility for the catastrophe.
But with the Indian government keen to attract foreign investment, the chances of a groundbreaking ruling look slim.
"Dow and Union Carbide are American companies," said Afroze Bi, a survivor whose son died while clinging to his father as they tried to flee the cloud of fumes. "Poor people like us don't have a chance against them."
Arif Nagar and other destitute neighbourhoods around the plant became a graveyard as residents choked to death on more than 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate -- the raw material used to make the pesticide carbaryl.
"I started frothing from the mouth, my eyes were huge and red. I thought I was going to die," said Hamid Khan, 70, who watched his two children die in the disaster and whose skin and organs are racked with infections to this day.
Khan was a day labourer at the time, but -- like many living in the vicinity -- the effects of the gas and years of exposure to contaminated water and soil left him too weak to do regular work.
Government figures put the death tollat 3,500 within the first three days but independent data by the state-run Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) puts the figure at between 8,000 and 10,000 for the same period.
"There were people falling, hundreds of them lying on the street vomiting, unconscious, convulsing," said N.R. Bhandari, who in 1984 was medical superintendent of one of the main hospitals in Bhopal and also led research for the ICMR.
Survivors say the anniversary marks another year of physical and psychological trauma compounded by government and corporate negligence.
Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide in 1999, but says all liabilities related to the accident were cleared in a 470 million dollar out of court settlement with the Indian government in 1989.
Calling the event a "terrible tragedy that understandably continues to evoke strong emotions even 25 years later" the company says it "worked diligently to provide aid to the victims and set up a process to resolve their claims."
It insists the leak was caused by an unidentified act of sabotage and emphasises that the state government, which took control of the site 10 years ago, is now responsible for the tonnes of toxic waste yet to be cleared up.
Activists and victims reacted furiously when Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, visiting the compound earlier this year, held a clump of soil in his hand and declared he was still healthy.
"The government is so insensitive, it has no idea what is happening to our children," said Mamta Sen, as she held her six-year-old mentally challenged son Sandeep.
The ICMR conducted research on the health effects of the disaster until the central government ordered it to stop in 1994. Most of the research was never published, which Bhandari calls a "criminal scientific waste."
"Bureaucrats don't understand medical things and yet they want to dominate everywhere," he said. "The studies should have been continued to see the long-term effects of the leak."
Survivors suffer from ailments such as respiratory and kidney problems, hormonal imbalances, mental illness and cancer, and new generations have not been spared from the polluted groundwater and poisonous breastmilk fed to them from birth.
To this day, children are born grotesquely disfigured, with webbed hands and feet, weak immune systems, stunted growth, and congenital disorders, like 10-year-old Vikas who cannot stand or walk due to his spindly legs.
He beams and opens his mouth wide eager to speak, but the only sound that comes out is a high-pitched gurgle.
Twenty-seven-year-old Raj Kumari's height is also stunted. Her belly juts out as though she is pregnant, but her mother tells AFP she gave birth recently.
"She is sick from the gas and the water. The bump has been growing for months but the doctors say it will go away," said her mother Leela Bai.
The compensation doled out to survivors by the government -- between 1,000 to 2,000 dollars each -- has dried up after years of paying for the long-term health impact of the disaster.
ICMR research showed that 25,000 people have died from the consequences of exposure since 1984. After that research concluded, government statistics said 100,000 people were chronically sick, with more than 30,000 people living in water-contaminated areas.
Instead of the slums around the plant becoming a ghost town, victims -- mostly day labourers and migrants from outside Bhopal -- flocked to squat on the swampy land surrounding the factory, sometimes even buying it at cheap prices.
Although the government has set up new pipelines to connect residents to clean drinking water, the supply is infrequent and they often rely on archaic handpumps that spout dirty water.
"If the government supply doesn't fill up the tank we have no choice but to drink the groundwater, even though we know it makes us sick," said Sisupal Yadav as he lifted up his shirt to display a rash.
Survivors were furious when the government of Madhya Pradesh state, of which Bhopal is capital, announced plans to open the old factory to curious visitors keen to witness the scene of such tragedy. Last week it reversed its decision.
Inside the building, dozens of bottles of chemicals are still stocked in the factory's lab, covered in dust and cobwebs and surrounded by broken glass.
Emergency instructions and a sticker reading "safety is everybody's business" still hang on the wall, and families and cattle wander by.
Criminal cases against former Union Carbide executives are pending in various Indian courts to force them and Dow to take more responsibility for the catastrophe.
But with the Indian government keen to attract foreign investment, the chances of a groundbreaking ruling look slim.
"Dow and Union Carbide are American companies," said Afroze Bi, a survivor whose son died while clinging to his father as they tried to flee the cloud of fumes. "Poor people like us don't have a chance against them."
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