Corporate Slaughter Of The Innocents
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Corporate Slaughter Of The Innocents
Date:
Fri, 23 Aug 2002 13:36:33 -400
From:
Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization: Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State of California, Department of Pesticide
Regulation
cc: Christine Whitman whitman.christine@epa.gov
Saturday, August 17, 2002 - Print Edition, Page D7 - The Globe and Mail
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Corporate Slaughter Of The Innocents By ALANNA MITCHELL
Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World's
Deadliest Industrial Disaster
By Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro
Translated by Kathryn Spink
Warner Books, 403 pages, $36.95
The accident happened almost 20 years ago, but Bhopal, an ancient city in the heart of India, is still synonymous with industrial death on an incomprehensible scale.
The numbers that tell this ghastly tale are in the public domain already: between 16,000 and 30,000 killed when a U.S.-built Union Carbide plant released a cloud of toxic gas; more than half a million horribly injured. That's out of a city population of about 600,000. People still die from their gruesome chemical injuries today.
What has not been in the public domain, until French journalist Dominique Lapierre and his Spanish cohort Javier Moro spent three years researching and writing Five Past Midnight in Bhopal, is the scope of the disaster and its effect on the lives of innocents. Or the scale of Union Carbide's betrayal of the people of India.
This book has all that. It describes exactly why and how the disaster happened, alongside the stories of some of the poorest Bhopalis affected. There is no hand-wringing, no saccharine, no valiant attempt at philosophizing. This is simply a poignant, beautifully written call for justice for the people of Bhopal.
Its power lies in the inevitability of the narrative. Starting in two discrete parts of the world -- a chemist's lab in Yonkers and a peasant's hut in the state of Orissa, India -- the book twists together the fates of the makers of the pesticide Sevin and the people whose crops the chemical is intended to save. On the peasants' side, the story centres on the Nadar family in the remote village of Mudilapa in Orissa. They have already lost a child to an industrial accident, when the makeshift fireworks factory he worked in blew up. After aphids destroy the last chance they have to survive, the rest of the family makes its way to Bhopal, one of India's famed cultural centres, to find a better life.
They wind up in a Bhopal shantytown -- Orya bustee -- on the side of the railway tracks in the shadow of the site where the Union Carbide plant will be built several years later. Theirs is a life of starvation, want and ingenuity. But it is a vibrant, joyful life on the edges of the world's biggest democracy.
Union Carbide, meantime, has developed Sevin, one of the most effective pesticides ever discovered. It holds out the hope of banishing the ancient spectre of famine in India, and elsewhere. But it needs the chemical methyl isocyanate -- one of the most lethal gases known to the chemical industry -- to make it work.
Union Carbide was already a beloved household name in India, where it sold half a billion batteries a year for electric lamps, bringing light to the most remote villages. When the company wanted to set up its pesticide plant there to save Indian crops from insects, the Indians were only too happy to oblige.
The plant in Bhopal, opened in 1976 and expanded to make methyl isocyanate in 1980, brought more than pest-free crops. Working there became the ultimate badge of honour, drawing educated men from all over the country, granting them an entrée into fantastic salaries and excellent marriages. And Union Carbide took pains to foster cultural interests among the people of Bhopal.
What the company neglected to do was to tell anyone that the plant was making lethal chemicals. It was, company officials convinced themselves, as innocuous as a chocolate factory. And somehow, even from the beginning, the Bhopal plant didn't have the same safety equipment and security systems as Union Carbide's big methyl isocyanate plant in West Virginia. Eventually, as Lapierre and Moro found, even the most basic safety precautions for the volatile chemical were utterly ignored in Bhopal.
At the end, as the market for Sevin dried up and the plant was shut down -- less than four years after it began making methyl isocyanate -- safety precautions that cost less than a few rupees were dismantled. Inevitably, the lethal chemical was contaminated, and that triggered the unstoppable exothermic reaction.
By the first minutes of Dec. 3, 1984, when a nearly full tank of methyl isocyanate erupted, the people charged with keeping the plant safe were so ill-trained that even when they smelled the volatile chemical in the air and knew the tank was rumbling, they went to have their tea break. Meanwhile, the Nadar family and many others in Bhopal's poor and rich districts were celebrating marriages because Dec. 2 was to have been the most auspicious day that year for marrying.
The hurricane of toxic gas killed relentlessly. Lungs burst. Victims drowned in their own bodily fluids. Pathologists who examined the first bodies found blood the consistency of jelly. Hearts, livers and spleens were grossly enlarged. The killing agent was hydrocyanide acid, created when methyl isocyanate reacted with other chemicals.
Nearly 20 years on, no court has ruled on Union Carbide's actions. Union Carbide itself, unable to survive the tragedy of Bhopal, has been swallowed up by other chemical companies. Few of the Bhopali victims got compensation for their losses, or effective treatment. Many of the chronically sick now rely on charity -- including from the sales of this book -- to survive.
Alanna Mitchell is The Globe and Mail's earth sciences reporter. Part of her family by marriage comes from the state of Orissa.
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