You’ve likely never heard of a chemical called methyl isocyanate, but you almost certainly have heard of that time it caused the biggest industrial disaster in history.
Today’s Moment of Science… the Bhopal Disaster.
Pesticides can be nasty business. They also can be handled safely, but even a little deviation from best practices can result in heightened danger. Often when we consider potential problems with these chemicals, our minds jump straight to any hazard they could cause in parts per billion on our carrots. We take for granted that they’ll be manufactured safely.
So, Bhopal.
At the Union Carbide factory, they were baking up carbaryl, the active component of Sevin. Carbaryl is an insecticide in the carbamate class. We generally think of organophosphates as the baddies, but carbamates aren’t exactly a basket of roses. They inhibit the same enzyme in humans as organophosphates, and likewise have been researched as nerve agents. But carbaryl isn’t what poisoned the citizens of Bhopal.
Some highly toxic shit is used in the manufacture of carbaryl, including phosgene and methyl isocyanate. Phosgene was used in WWI by France as a chemical weapon. It’s an organochloride, and every so often it would leak and cause, you know, chemical weapon stuff. In 1981 a phosgene leak injured two employees and killed one. A month later another phosgene leak sent dozens of employees to the hospital.
Methyl isocyanate (MIC) was their other monster. It evaporates quickly in the air, producing a vapor that burns the lungs, blinds, and of course, can be deadly. More importantly to this story, MIC reacts with water. Violently.
It’s unclear what, if anything, went right leading up to December 2-3rd, 1984. It’s like someone whispered into the wind ‘make this as fucking terrible as possible and salt the earth for a generation,’ and the idea was granted life.
An investigation would later find their refrigeration system for MIC had been turned off long before the accident by plant managers, increasing risk of reactions. One of their safety systems was offline, and another was overrun by the scale of the accident. The previous year, they’d cut workers per shift down by half to save money. The skilled labor of handling MIC generally required a college degree, but if they could hire someone with a high school diploma for less, they did. The plant’s training manual said “although the tear gas effects of the vapor are extremely unpleasant, this property cannot be used as a means to alert personnel” to leaks, but that’s totally what they did.
When a few workers felt their eyes water near the control room, they knew there was an MIC leak. The supervisor on duty wasn’t too concerned. After all, this fuckery happened all the time, and the gauges were broken so those ‘high pressure’ warnings on the tank were nothing to worry about either, right?
So they went for tea.
It’s unclear what the exact catalyzing event was, but most signs point to a faulty valve that piped water into the tank, causing a reaction some time after midnight on December 3rd.
Forty tons of MIC were released into the atmosphere. As the gas drifted into the air surrounding the plant, no warning alarm rang out. The people went about their day as you’re doing right now, the air around them silently becoming choked with poison.
Nearly 4,000 people died that day. The local hospital filled up. The streets were lined with the dead. Tens of thousands more were blinded or suffered respiratory problems. Reportedly nearly half of women who were pregnant and exposed to the gas miscarried. The current death toll is estimated to be 15k-20k. Over 500k have been affected by the ongoing disaster, with an alarmingly high percentage dealing with health problems.
I say ‘ongoing disaster’ because they never cleaned the place.
When I first read that, I was sure I was reading an outdated article.
They really just never cleaned the place and left so many people to suffer. In 2010 a Bhopal court convicted several former Union Carbide executives for negligence, but the company has never admitted fault. The one executive from the US who was charged with manslaughter, Warren Anderson, escaped back to the US before facing trial. He was allowed to die peacefully at a nursing home in 2014, unlike the thousands of people his company’s neglect killed in the streets with poisonous gas.
Union Carbide Company, now owned entirely by DOW, has long maintained this was the fault of the workers.
This has been your daily Moment of Science with the reminder that thanks to capitalism, Bhopal will almost certainly not be the last Bhopal.
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