TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/84/84ind29

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                                                                                December 17, 1984

INDIA

India's Night of Death


More than 2,500 people are killed in the worst industrial
disaster ever


The first sign that something was wrong came at 11 p.m. A
worker at the Union Carbide pesticide plant on the outskirts of
Bhopal (pop. 672,000), an industrial city 466 miles south of New
Delhi, noticed that pressure was building up in a tank
containing 45 tons of methyl isocyanate, a deadly chemical used
to make pesticides. At 56 minutes past midnight, the substance
began escaping into the air from a faulty valve. For almost an
hour, the gas formed a vast, dense fog of death that drifted
toward Bhopal.

The vapor passed first over the shanty-towns of Jaiprakash and
Chhola, just outside the walls of the plant, leaving hundreds
dead as they slept. The gas quickly enveloped the city's
railway station, where beggars were huddled against the chill.
In minutes, a score had died and 200 others were gravely ill.
Through temples and shops, over streets and lakes, across a
25-sq.-mi. quadrant of the city, the cloud continued to spread,
noiselessly and lethally. The night air was fairly cool (about
60 degrees F), the wind was almost calm, and a heavy mist clung
to the earth; those conditions prevented the gas from
dissipating, as it would have done during the day.

A few hundred yards from the chemical plant, M.A. Khan, a
farmer, was lying in bed when he heard several thumps at a
nearby dairy farm and sensed that his own cows were milling
about restlessly. He arose and went outside. Two cows were
dead on the ground. A third gave out a loud groan and collapsed
as Khan watched. Then the farmer's eyes began to smart
painfully. He ran into the darkness. The day after at Bhopal's
Hamidia Hospital, his eyes shut tightly and tears streaming down
his cheeks, Khan described his fear:  "I thought it was a
plague."

Others thought it was a nuclear bomb or an earthquake or the end
of the world. As word of the cloud of poison began to spread,
hundreds, then thousands, took to the road in flight from the
fumes. In cars and rickshaws, on foot and bicycles, residents
moved as fast as they could. As in some eerie science-fiction
nightmare, hundreds of people blinded by the gas groped vainly
toward uncontaminated air or stumbled into one another in the
darkness. Others simply collapsed by the side of the road in
the crush. At least 37 people who had inhaled the fumes died
hours later from the effects, having reached what they thought
was safety.

By week's end more than 2,500 people were dead in the worst
industrial disaster the world has known. At least 1,000 more
were expected to die from the fumes in the next two weeks; some
3,000 remained critically ill. In all, 150,000 people were
treated at hospitals and clinics in Bhopal and surrounding
communities. Most of the dead had succumbed because their lungs
had filled with fluid, causing the equivalent of death by
drowning. Others had suffered heart attacks. The disaster
struck hardest at children and old people, whose lungs were
either too small or too weak to withstand the poison. A number
of the survivors were permanently blinded, others suffered
serious lesions in their nasal and bronchial passages. Doctors
also noticed concussions, paralysis and signs of epilepsy,
suggesting, they said, the presence of some other chemical --
perhaps phosgene, which is used to make methyl isocyanate. Six
days after the accident, patients were still arriving at
Hamidia Hospital at the rate of one a minute, many of them
doubled over with racking coughs, gasping for breath or
convulsed with violent spasms that brought a red froth to the
lips.

Within hours of the leak, hundreds of victims had lined up at
Hamidia Hospital and makeshift clinics, where doctors and nurses
worked frantically to ease their misery. As the hospitals
filled, patients gathered in the corridors or on the grounds
outside; side by side, babies and children thrashed around,
unable to breathe. Thousands of animals were also killed by the
gas. As the days passed, a sickly stench of decay arose from
the bloated carcasses of water buffalo, cattle and dogs that
clogged the city's streets. Finally, the army removed them with
cranes. But as long as animal and human corpses decomposed in
the open air, the threat of contamination increased, and with
it the specter of cholera. Meanwhile, rats scurried around the
dead bodies, awakening fears of bubonic plague. For days,
vultures and wild-eyed pariah dogs roamed through the piles of
rotting flesh, feasting.

Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded his mother Indira as Prime Minister
after her assassination in October, broke off his campaigning
for the Dec. 24 national elections to visit Bhopal. Expressing
his shock and sorrow, Gandhi announced a $4 million relief fund.
In addition, Arjun Singh, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh
state, of which Bhopal is the capital, promised compensation of
about $500 for every family that had suffered a death and $100
for every family that had a member hospitalized. President
Reagan sent Gandhi a note expressing the grief shared by him and
the American people.

The disaster in Bhopal was the latest in a series of major
industrial mishaps around the world, some with immediate fatal
results, others with lingering, long-term consequences. Last
week in Taiwan, leaking methane gas in a coal shaft triggered
an explosion that killed 33 miners. Two weeks earlier a
liquefied-natural-gas explosion claimed 452 lives near a Mexico
City shantytown. As the list of such man- made tragedies grows,
concern is rising everywhere that industrial safety standards
are often higher in the U.S. than in developing countries, and
that some U.S. firms may have opened plants abroad to take
advantage of the disparity. Indeed, the accident in India
touched off a wave of anticapitalist rhetoric. TASS, the Soviet
news agency, called the disaster "the logical consequence of the
general policy pursued by multinational corporations, which
market low- quality products and outdated technology in
developing countries." Said a U.S. embassy official in New
Delhi:  "This is a feast for the Communists. They'll go with it
for weeks."

Prominent among the targets of that antibusiness backlash was
Union Carbide. Within hours of the accident, police in Bhopal
closed the plant and arrested its manager, J. Mukund, as well
as four of his colleagues, on charges of "culpable homicide
through negligence." When a team of five technical experts from
Union Carbide's headquarters in Danbury, Conn., arrived to
inspect the factory, they were turned away by local authorities.
"We don't want anyone tampering with the evidence," said an
official. The Indian Central Bureau of Investigation,
meanwhile, seized records and logbooks at the plant, and Chief
Minister Singh ordered a judicial inquiry into the accident.
"This is a devastating tragedy," said Singh. "It was sudden and
deadly, and there was a terrible human failure somewhere along
the line. I have closed down the plant, probably forever."

Perhaps the most spectacular government action came when Warren
M.anderson, 63, Union Carbide's U.S. chairman, flew to Bhopal
later in the week. Immediately after his arrival, he and two
officials of the company's Indian subsidiary were arrested and
charged with "negligence and criminal corporate liability" and
"criminal conspiracy," which under Indian law carries a maximum
penalty of death. Instead of being taken to prison, the three
executives were detained at the company's comfortable Bhopal
guesthouse, surrounded by 50 armed guards to protect them from
possible mob attacks, and cut off from communication with the
outside world. After more than six hours, Anderson was released
on $2,500 bond and flown to New Delhi, while his colleagues
remained in custody. "Somebody has to say that our safety
standards in the U.S. are identical to those in India or Brazil
or some place else," Anderson said after his release. "Same
equipment, same design, same everything."

With national elections approaching, officials may have been
playing for publicity with Anderson's arrest. The gesture may
also have been intended to dramatize a growing demand among
Indian politicians for Union Carbide to pay the same sort of
compensation to Bhopal's victims that it would if they were
Americans. Those U.S. rates, under which each claimant could
typically win $100,000, are considerably higher than their
Indian equivalents. At week's end, three American attorneys,
including Melvin Belli, filed a lawsuit in Charleston, W. Va.,
on behalf of Bhopal victims, asking damages of $15 billion.
Said a company spokesman in Danbury:  "Something like this
happens, and people everywhere begin seeing dollar signs in
front of their eyes."

As Indian officials began their investigations, details started
to emerge about what went wrong at the plant. Methyl
isocyanate, a colorless chemical compound that behaves in humans
and animals like a potent form of tear gas, is used by Union
Carbide as an ingredient in producing relatively toxic
pesticides known as Sevin and Temik. At the Bhopal facility it
was stored in three double-walled, stainless steel tanks, buried
mostly underground to limit leakage in the event of an accident
and to help shield them from air temperatures that could soar
to 120 degrees F in summer. Refrigerated to keep the highly
volatile gas in its liquid form, the tanks were also equipped
with thermostats, valves and other devices to warn when the
temperature of the chemical exceeded 100 degrees F, the point
at which the liquid turns into a gas. Should the temperature
rise further, the gas would expand, increasing pressure on the
inside of the tank. Should the pressure build, a relief valve
would vent the gas in order to prevent a rupture of the tank.

The Bhopal plant had two safety devices that would operate
automatically in case a tank ruptured. The first was a scrubber
that would neutralize the highly reactive gas by treating it
with caustic soda. If the scrubber failed to do the job,
another mechanism would ignite the gas and burn it off in the
air harmlessly before it could do much damage.

Whether through human error or mechanical failure, neither of
those safety measures worked last week. The plant had been
temporarily closed for maintenance two weeks before the
accident, and both the methyl isocyanate storage tanks and the
pipes connecting them were under repair. According to Madanlal
Ranji, president of the plant's labor union, the scrubber was
also in the process of being fixed. To make matters worse, a
critical panel in the control room had been removed, perhaps as
part of the maintenance program, thus preventing the leak from
showing up on monitors.

Almost two hours before the gas escaped, a workman noticed that
the temperature in the tanks was well above 100 degrees F and
rising steadily. As a result, pressure in the tanks was
mounting. The worker tried to manually operate the mechanisms
that were supposed to relieve the pressure, but it had already
gone too high. He alerted his supervisor, and four colleagues
donned gas masks and hurried to the scene. They too were unable
to seal the tank; by then, all systems had failed.

Meanwhile, panic broke out among the 120 workers still in the
plant. One employee said he sounded a siren to warn the
surrounding community, but few of the surviving residents recall
hearing it. Many of the workers reportedly began running for
their lives, leaving just one supervisor in the factory to do
battle with the fumes. The man, identified later as Shakeel
Ahmed, collapsed from the effects of the gas before he could
control it. (At week's end his condition was critical.)  Nearly
an hour after the gas began escaping into the air, the tank was
sealed by engineers from another company, Bharat Heavy
Electricals Ltd., sent in by local authorities. By that time,
however, all the gas had escaped.

Government investigators hope to determine why none of the
workers inside the plant died from the fumes, while outside the
plant thousands were killed. The inquiries are also expected
to touch on the delicate questions of why the safety systems
failed and whether Union Carbide was negligent in maintaining
them. Union Carbide executives firmly deny such allegations.
Yet Jackson Browning, the U.S. company's corporate director of
health, safety and environmental affairs, conceded that the
Indian facility lacked the computerized warning system used at
a sister plant in Institute, W. Va. Moreover, according to a
former Indian executive of Union Carbide India, the Bhopal plant
was furnished with only one manual, back-up alarm system instead
of the four-stage alarm system reportedly required in the U.S.

Meanwhile, preliminary investigations by several committees,
including one of Indian chemists and other experts, indicated
that there had been a number of accidents at the Bhopal plant
since it first went into operation in 1977. According to Chief
Minister Singh, the Union Carbide facility had endured six
accidents in six years before the recent tragedy. In all, he
said, one worker had been killed, 47 injured and $620,000 worth
of property destroyed.

Union Carbide was first incorporated in India 50 years ago, when
it began manufacturing batteries in Calcutta. The Indian
subsidiary was allowed to stay on after independence from
Britain and is one of the few firms in India in which the parent
company is permitted to hold a majority interest, in this case
50.9%. Union Carbide has long enjoyed the favor of an Indian
government eager to encourage sophisticated industry and develop
the "Green Revolution" in agriculture, of which pesticides are
an important ingredient. When the company built a small
pesticide plant outside Bhopal in 1969, the project was approved
by local authorities with the blessing of the national
government. The firm was even exempted from a number of local
taxes and provided with water and electricity at concessional
prices.

When the small installation was set up, the plant was just
outside the city limits; by the time an expansion program got
under way six years later, squatters had begun to settle in the
once deserted area, many of them attracted by the roads and
water lines that accompanied the plant. In 1975, M.N. Buch,
administrator of the municipal corporation, asked that the plant
be removed. Instead, Buch was promptly removed by government
authorities, and the plant remained.

India's Department of the Environment last July announced
strict guidelines banning the location of plants that produce
such hazardous substances as gases, poisons and explosives in
areas where population growth is expected. But whether the
ruling was supposed to govern facilities already constructed
remained uncertain. More fundamentally, the safety restrictions
ran counter to local governments' desire to attract industry.
So far, not a single company has been denied permission to
build. When the issue of the Union Carbide plant's permit arose
in the Madhya Pradesh state assembly in December 1982, then
Labor Minister Tarasingh Viyogi took pains to remind his
listeners that the plant had cost $25 million to build. "The
factory is not a small stone that can be shifted elsewhere," he
argued. "There is no danger to Bhopal, nor will there be."

In Bhopal and elsewhere, medical authorities last week began to
grow concerned about the long-term effects of exposure to
methyl isocyanate. While there is no evidence that the chemical
causes cancer, doctors in Bhopal believe that many survivors of
the accident may suffer from emphysema, asthma or bronchitis.
In addition, some medical experts suspect that the poisoning
could result in damage to the liver and the kidneys, and could
have other even more harrowing effects. "The gas affects the
central nervous system," said Dr. Sanjay Mittal, a doctor at
Hamidia Hospital. "In my opinion, this increases the chances
of permanent mental retardation."  One of Mittal's senior
colleagues reported that there had been eight stillbirths at
Hamidia on the first day after the accident. "Pregnant women
were brought to me in great pain," he said. "They had to be
aborted. Children in the womb had stopped kicking and bodies
were rejecting fetuses."

A more hopeful diagnosis was provided by William Brown,
associate professor of biological sciences at Carnegie-Mellon
University. Both respiratory ailments and blindness in people
exposed to low levels of the gas will, said Brown, "go way. A
chemical reaction is taking place in which the molecules of
isocyanate will be turned over and excreted by the system."
Even Brown, however, conceded that Bhopal residents who received
higher dosages would not be so fortunate. Those who endured
total whitening of the eyes would, he admitted, never recover
their sight, and those whose lungs were totally coated with gas
would probably die of respiratory failure.

Despite the prospect of continuing medical damage, last week's
tragedy may have a long-term salutary effect:  it awakened a
resolve across India that the episode not be repeated. "It is
clear that safety standards in this country are unsatisfactory,
and that every city with large industry has become a danger
zone," editorialized the Indian Express, one of India's most
prestigious English-language dailies. It was equally clear that
the country, which in its 37 years of independence has weathered
floods and famines, riots and rebellions, would nonetheless be
haunted and chastened by last week's disaster for decades to
come.

Again and again, Prime Minister Gandhi and his ministers
reiterated last week their determination to impose, and enforce,
new and stricter industrial safety regulations. "We are
concerned not only about this plant but about similar places as
well," said Gandhi at Bhopal. "I believe there must be an
overall government policy change."

For all the resolutions, perhaps the most poignant comments came
from agonized survivors like A. Raoof, a Bhopal farmer. "We
never understood why they would build a factory containing
poison gas close to where people live," said Raoof, still
choking 30 hours after the gas seeped through his home. "They
could have gone out in the jungle where no one lives. Now we
are mourning our dead."  As he spoke, silent processions of
survivors carried the dead, wrapped in white cotton shrouds and
covered with flowers, through the streets of the poisoned city
to the nearby Chhola Vishram cremation site. There, four, five,
six bodies were thrown onto a pyre that usually served only one.
Rows upon rows of pyres burned through the night.

--By Pico Iyer.  Reported by Dean Brelis/Bhopal


---------------------------------------------------------
Catalog of Catastrophe

Despite precautions, the manufacture and storage of
sophisticated chemicals can occasionally lead to accidental
tragedy. Among the major catastrophes of the modern industrial
era:

Mexico City, Nov. 19, 1984. Shortly before dawn, liquefied-gas
tanks exploded at the San Juan Ixhuatepec storage facility
operated by state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos. The resulting fire
took 452 lives and injured 4,248 in Mexico's largest industrial
disaster; 1,000 people are still missing.

Cubatao, Brazil, Feb. 25, 1984. Gasoline from a leaky pipeline
in this southeast Brazilian town exploded into a giant fireball
that killed at least 500 people.

San Carlos de la Rapita, Spain, July 11, 1978. An overloaded
38-ton truck carrying 1,518 cu. ft. of combustible propylene gas
skidded around a bend in the road and slammed into a wall,
sending 100-ft.- high flames into a campsite where 780 tourists
were eating, sunbathing and swimming. The death toll:  215.

Seveso, Italy, July 10, 1976. Between 1 lb. and 22 lbs. of
poisonous dioxin were released into the atmosphere over an area
of 4,500 acres when a chemical reaction at the Hoffman-La Roche
plant set off an explosion. More than 1,000 residents were
forced to flee, and many children developed a disfiguring rash
called chloracne, but no lives were lost.

Flixborough on Humberside, England, June 1, 1974. Britain's
biggest peacetime explosion occurred at the Nypro (U.K.) Ltd.
chemical plant when a pipe ruptured. The plant produced
Caprolactum, which is woven into nylon. The blast killed 28
workers and leveled every building on the 60-acre site.

Ludwigshafen, Germany, July 28, 1948. A railway car
transporting dimethylether, used in making acetic acid and
dimethylsulfate, to the I.G. Farben chemical plant, exploded
inside the factory gates. The blast and resulting fire killed
207 people and injured 4,000.

Texas City, Texas, April 16, 1947. During the night of April
15, a fire broke out on the Grand Camp, a freighter anchored in
the harbor of this port town on Galveston Bay. The Grand Camp
carried 1,400 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. At 8 the
next morning, the Grand Camp exploded in a blast that rattled
windows 150 miles away. Flames leaped 700 ft. to a nearby
Monsanto plant that produced styrene, a combustible ingredient
of synthetic rubber. Minutes later the Monsanto plant exploded,
setting off fires throughout the city. On April 17 the
freighter High Flyer, also loaded with nitrates, exploded in the
harbor. The toll:  576 dead, 2,000 seriously injured.

Cleveland, Oct. 20, 1944. A liquefied-natural-gas tank
belonging to the East Ohio Gas Co. developed a structural
weakness that led to a huge explosion. The blast and fire
killed 131.

Oppau, Germany, Sept. 21, 1921. The biggest chemical explosion
in German history occurred in a warehouse about 50 miles south
of Frankfurt when workers used dynamite to pry loose 4,000 tons
of caked ammonium nitrate fertilizer. The blast killed 561
people and leveled houses four miles away.