Last week was yet another anniversary — that of the 1984 accident at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, one of the worst industrial accidents ever. The massive leak of toxic Methyl Isocyanate (MIC) that took place on the night of December 3 that year has killed thousands (estimates vary from 2,000 to 10,000) and over 100,000 injured. Recently released documents prove to what extent multinational corporations like Union Carbide are willing to sacrifice safety and people’s health in the pursuit of profits.
For long Union Carbide, the parent company based in the USA, has maintained that the Indian subsidiary was wholly responsible for the design and running of the Bhopal plant. Speaking to New Scientist, a British Science magazine, a spokesperson from Dow Chemical (which took over Union Carbide) recently insisted: “Union Carbide maintained a very ‘hands-off’ relationship with Union Carbide India on virtually all matters”. But as part of an ongoing class action suit, which alleges that the company demonstrated reckless and depraved indifference to human life through its Bhopal operations, in New York the company had to release a number of documents — which clearly contradict its claims.
Even prior to this lawsuit Union Carbide’s responsibility was clear to most observers. As the cliché goes, it was an accident waiting to happen. Union Carbide had experienced declining profits in its international operations, and especially in this plant. So it instituted a series of cost-cutting measures — cutting down on safety in the process. All of these resulted, in the words of James Chiles, the author of Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology, “lax maintenance and crumbling safeguards”.
The Bhopal plant had three safety systems that could help manage a MIC leak to some degree: a scrubber tower that could break down the MIC into other, less harmful, chemical compounds; a refrigeration system to keep the MIC at low temperatures and discourage any runaway reactions; and a big torch to flare or burn off escaping MIC vapour. There was also a water spray intended for fire fighting and was thought to be useful in the event of an MIC release because water would neutralise some of the vapour if it escaped.
All three safety systems were compromised prior to the accident. The refrigerant had been siphoned off for use elsewhere in the plant upon the orders of senior management. The scrubber had been turned off — even if it had been on, it was incapable of dealing with the huge amount of MIC that escaped. And to replace a corroded section of the pipe that had to arrive from the US, workers shut down the flare as well. On the night of the accident as the gas escaped from the one hundred foot stack, the plant’s firefighters discovered that the water spray could not shoot water that high.
Besides these, Union Carbide had also compromised on personnel. It had laid-off key people and reduced shift size at nights. Between 1980 and 1984, the MIC production crew was reduced by half. All of this had their effects. In 1982, a safety survey revealed that workers often left work unfinished. It also found leaky valves, inaccurate instrumentation, poor training and inadequate safety devices. More than a year before the accident, critical instruments designed to show pressure readings and temperature levels were malfunctioning — and not replaced.
All of this is old news. What the new set of documents reveal is that Union Carbide not only ran the plant in a shoddy manner, but that there was massive cost cutting and the use of unproven technologies even at the design stage. A 1972 memo, for example, says that in order to maintain its dominant ownership over the Indian operations, Union Carbide decided to reduce the amount of investment, cutting “mainly on the Sevin project”. [Sevin was the herbicide whose production required the use of MIC.] Another memo admits to the use of “unproven technologies” and the fact that the Sevin production system involved in the accident had had “only a limited trial run”. The documents also mention that the proposed design led to the risk of “polluting subsurface water supplies in the Bhopal area” and called for the construction of new solar ponds “at one to two-year intervals throughout the life of the project”. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Union Carbide did nothing of that sort.
The dirty story of Union Carbide continues even after the accident. In 1990, Union Carbide commissioned the Indian National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) to make a study of contamination arising from the abandoned plant. The company has used this report to assert the absence of any danger. However, one of the newly-released documents shows that Union Carbide itself placed no trust in the NEERI data.
Its own analysis of soil and liquid samples drawn by the company in June-July 1989 “had organic contamination varying from 10 per cent to 100 per cent and contained known ingredients like napthol and naphthalene in substantial quantities. All samples caused 100 per cent mortality to fish in toxicity assessment studies and were to be diluted several fold to render them suitable for survival of fish.” The pollution persists even today. A 2002 study by a group of NGOs discovered that chemical contamination was not limited to the soil but had spread to the water supply, vegetables grown in the area and even mother’s milk.
Union Carbide has since been taken over by Dow, which refuses to accept any responsibility related to the Bhopal tragedy. At the same time, the company also has the temerity to claim: “At Dow, we have redoubled our efforts to make protection of people and the environment a part of everything we do and every decision we make. We have taken, and continue to take, strong steps to realise our ‘vision of zero’ — zero incidents, zero injuries, zero environmental harm. No lesser ideal is acceptable to us.” As one would say in Hindi or Urdu, kaash! One wishes this were true.
