Despite the lessons of Bhopal, chemical accidents are on the rise
In December 1984 the lethal escape of methyl isocyanate in Bhopal, India, unleashed a wave of concern about chemical calamities. Legislation in the U.S. and India strove to lessen the danger to communities, and the United Nations renewed its efforts to warn about toxins. But a decade later industrial chemicals remain poorly understood: when similar accidents occur, doctors are just as likely to be faced with a mysterious poison as they were in Bhopal.
Moreover, the potential for catastrophe is scarcely diminished. In the eight years preceding the disaster, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recorded 74 major accidents; in the eight years following, the number reached 106. And between 1980 and 1990 the number of gas releases that exceeded Bhopal in quantity and toxicity totaled 15 in the U.S. alone.
"Unlike pesticides and drugs," explains Donald J. Lisk of Cornell University, "industrial chemicals were not intended to be ingested." Thus, studying them is not a priority. Adequate toxicology exists for only 2 to 3 percent of the more than 70,000 substances used to create about five million products, observes Joseph LaDou of the University of California at San Francisco. For 75 percent, there is no toxicology at all.
In the U.S. the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act was designed to fill this gap, but the task proved too enormous. Consequently, more than 60,000 existing chemicals were "grandfathered in," with the Environmental Protection Agency requiring scattered tests on no more than 100. Of the chemicals introduced since 1979, the EPA restricts the use of 7 percent. But older substances make up 99.9 percent of the six-trillion-pound total.
Although the Occupational Safety and Health Administration mandates Material Safety Data Sheets for at least 600 chemicals to which workers might be exposed, companies are not required to perform tests--they need only list what they do know. So humans often end up serving as guinea pigs. According to Daniel Deitelbaum of the University of Colorado, solvents, resins and glues have been implicated in the testicular cancers and other disorders of 5,000 male employees at Lockheed.
The lack of information about toxics continues to haunt communities, not just workers. In 1986--after the Union Carbide incident in Bhopal and a subsequent release at the company's sister plant in Institute, W. Va., where a chemical leak sent 135 neighbors to the hospital--the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act was passed. It required facilities using certain chemicals to report their amounts and locations to Local Emergency Planning Committees (LEPCs), which were to plan responses to accidents. The federal government did not authorize funding for the 4,100 LEPCs, however. In 1990 the EPA concluded that most of these groups were dominated by industry and government representatives and had failed to inform communities of hazards, for fear of causing "counterproductive panic."
According to Fred Millar, an accident prevention expert based in Washington, D.C., some of the LEPCs themselves panicked when they saw the facts. The "plume map" for Houston, for example, showed that more than 50 percent of the city is vulnerable to toxic releases. The New York State Attorney General's Office has calculated that some gas clouds could travel a mile in 17.6 minutes; alerting the community, let alone evacuating it, might take up to an hour.
In 1990 environmentalists and labor groups pushed through amendments to the Clean Air Act that required companies to conduct hazard assessments and to make public their worst-case scenarios. But the EPA missed its 1993 deadline to draw up the required rules, and the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, which the amendments also established for independently investigating accidents, does not yet exist. Nor is it funded.
In New Jersey and California, active programs do exist for reducing the likelihood of accidents. Nevertheless, dangers persist. According to Peter Costanza, a New Jersey regulator, the contents of any of up to 20 railroad tank cars of chlorine in the state, some in crowded areas such as Elizabeth and Newark, can kill thousands. "We make sure the valves are tight," Costanza reflects, but that would not prevent a truck from puncturing one of them.
The National Environmental Law Center concludes that 10 billion pounds of "extremely hazardous chemicals," such as chlorine, are currently stored in the U.S. About once a day, an event involving immediate injury, evacuation or death is reported to the Emergency Response Notification System database. (That number is probably optimistic: between 1988 and 1990 the system listed only 13 percent of the accidents recorded by New York State.) Apart from such histories, no measure of the risk from accidents seems to exist in the U.S.
In many places, the situation is even worse. After Bhopal, the United Nations Environment Program strengthened its efforts to make data on toxic materials available to developing nations. Unfortunately, firefighters and hospitals there rarely receive the information. "In terms of accessibility," LaDou states, "the U.N. efforts are 30 years behind the U.S."
Worldwide the rate of chemical catastrophes is on the rise. Bhopal prompted several nations to support an agreement, known as Prior Informed Consent, requiring countries exporting hazardous substances to inform the importing nation. No such system exists for hazardous processes and technologies; even if it did, observers doubt that developing countries would use it. "In the current climate," notes Peter M. Haas of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, "any investment is fine, regardless of what technology it brings." For its nylon project in Goa, Du Pont has secured an agreement with its Indian partners that the multinational will not be liable for any accidents.
In India, projects based on hazardous technology are mushrooming despite the legislation that Bhopal prompted. The Environmental Protection Act of 1986 directed companies to supply information about toxic inventories, allowed for inspections and also created laboratories. A 1987 amendment to the Factories Act set guidelines for handling dangerous materials. But the acts cause information to flow to the government, not concerned communities.
Methyl isocyanate, at least, is no more to be found in India. After Bhopal, some U.S. companies started to use the substance in a closed-cycle process, so that the unstable fluid did not have to be stored. But at least 150,000 pounds of it reside at the Institute plant, which now belongs to Rhone-Poulenc. In case of a spill, residents are advised to "Shelter-in-Place": bring in pets, shut windows, stuff wet towels under doors and tune in for instructions. As yet, no plan exists for dealing with the worst-case scenario involving the chemical: death within the first nine miles of a plume stretched, by the usual wind conditions, right over town--which begins a quarter mile from the factory. "No way the community can get out," states Pamela L. Nixon, a medical technician who serves on the LEPC. Shelter-in-Place could well become, in Millar's words, "Gassed-in-Your-Home."--Madhusree Mukerjee
This is the second of a two-part article on the legacy of Bhopal.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN July 1995 Volume 273 Number 1 Page 22
Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), published monthly by Scientific American, Inc., 415 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017-1111. Copyright 1995 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved. Except for one-time personal use, no part of any issue may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise copied for public or private use without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding back issues, reprints or permissions, E-mail SCAinquiry@aol.com.
