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Bhopal Disaster Revisited [updated]
On December 3, 1984, a chemical plant run by Union Carbide and located in Bhopal, India
released about 40 tons of a toxic gas which was an intermediate chemical used in creating pesticides. (That is, the plant was in the business of creating chemicals deadly to life.) Safety at the plant had not been a concern of management; numerous safety systems were offline or non-functional. The gas cloud drifted over the city and killed thousands of people, and inflicted permanent injury to hundreds of thousands more. It was the worst industrial accident to date. Today, the site remains a contaminated wasteland, unusable and never cleaned up. The survivors have been minimally compensated, but as time passes, enough of them have died that compensation may now be in the works. Update: 12/03 15:51 GMT by M : Whoops, just kidding, the Reuters story linked there is wrong; the BBC was apparently hoaxed into putting a Dow spokesman on TV who wasn't actually a Dow spokesman. Dow has no plans to clean up the facility and no plans to compensate the survivors. Hope this clears things up.
Yeah, except that the chairman of UC has been charged with culpable homicide in India, and declared a fugitive. But the US govt. has so far refused to let him be extradited for trial.
Sadly, the Reuters story of Dow paying $12Billion is false.
numerous safety systems were offline or non-functional.
Technology didn't fail. People did.
"BBC World said yesterday it was duped in an "elaborate deception" by a man who claimed to be a Dow Chemical Co spokesman and said the US company accepted responsibility for India's Bhopal disaster."
The story
I just want to put the following quote: The survivors have been minimally compensated, but as time passes, enough of them have died that compensation may now be in the works. in the context of the Indian Legal system.
The Indian Legal system is notorious for the lack of speed with which the wheels of justice turn. Even for the smallest cases ten years from filing to final disposition is not unusual.
I recently read an article which discussed several cases from the 1950s that is still in the courts and still being fought.
Yours,
Jordan Dea-Mattson
The Reuters story you quoted is based on a hoax. See the BBC's retraction.
Jesus BLOODY FUCK is it that hard to spell HYPOCRISY like you have a brain in your head?
Perhaps someone else can verify the facts. What I understood was:
The president (ceo?) of UC turned up in India immediately after the incident. He said that he was horrified and the company would do everything it could to make things better. The Indian government then arrested him. After that UC brought in the lawyers and the result is what you see today. Advice to the Indians: You get more flies with honey than with vinegar.
The reason the compensation for the victims is so pitiful is that it was done under Indian law. In Indian law, if you accidentally kill someone, the compensation is based on what they would have been worth at the end of their life. In most cases, that is pretty much zero. In American law, you get an amount that tries to reduce the consequences of the death. ie. If you are caring for your parents and are killed, the damages include an amount to replace that care. This produces much greater damages than the Indian case.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
It wasn't even like that! Union Carbide settled with the government in India for nearly $500M in the late 1980's. That money has gone virtually unused since then. Unused!
On top of that, Union Carbide did more than it had to in providing cash directly to survivors. NPR had the story this monring of a women whose husband died. She was living in an apartment paid for life by UC and recieved $4,000 cash shortly after the disaster. For someone who in her whole life never had more than a few dollars worth of money, that's a princely sum.
The Bhopal disaster isn't necessarily the worst industrial accident. Many people give that distinction to the collapse of the Baia Mare Dam, a tailings dam for a gold mine, holding water laced with cyanide and heavy metals. It dumped on the order of 100,000 cubic meters of this stuff into the Danube, killing tons and tons of fish and poisoning the drinking water of millions in Hungary. Luckily, the Australian parent company had an excellent Public Relations contract; this wasn't even news in Europe, much less in the USA.
m l
Here's one link to it.
http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/mdafbm.ht
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The Bhopal plant was jointly owned by Union Carbide and the Indian government, with the government owning 51%.
Straight from the horse's mouth: http://www.bhopal.com/facts.htm
FACT: The Bhopal plant was built, owned and operated by Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL). Union Carbide held 51 percent of the shares in UCIL, the Indian government owned 26 percent, and some 24,000 private Indian citizens owned the balance.
FACT: Union Carbide never actually operated in India. Rather, Union Carbide India Ltd. (UCIL), a separate company 50.9% owned by Union Carbide, was controlling the operation of the Bhopal factory at the time of the tragedy. Following the tragedy, the Government of India ceased production at the plant and took complete control of the property.
Bhopal.com is run by Union Carbide so you can't question this source.
For those who of you claiming they met their responsibilities and that the Indian government was somehow to blame here's some food for thought:
An enquiry towards the official position on their stance on the whole debacle received this response (translated by me, reads pretty much the same in norwegian):
Union Carbide have nothing but the highest respect and compassion for the populace of Bhopal, however Union Carbide have no interesents - nor any responsibility for - the Bhopal-facilities.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
When a company buys another company, they purchase both the assets and the liabilities. (For example, if Delta bought American Airways, they get not only the planes, routes, and airport space, they also get all those folks who paid $2 million for a lifetime of walk on tickets).
"BHOPAL: THE SEARCH FOR JUSTICE
Dec 4th - San Francisco
Dec 5th - Stanford, 1:30 pm, Bechtel Intl Center
Screening and Discussion
with NADEEM UDDIN , Director
On December 3, 1984, the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India leaked poisonous methyl isocyanate gas killing fifteen thousand helpless men, women and children. Hundreds of thousands more were permanently maimed. Bhopal was, and remains, the world's worst chemical industry disaster" http://ektaonline.org/events/bhopal/index.htm
Warren Anderson was never the chairman of Dow Chemical. He was the chairman of Union Carbide at the time of the disaster, and retired from that position within a couple of years. Dow did not acquire UC until 1999. It is Dow's position that the $470 million settlement that was paid in 1989 (of which $330 million remained in July of 2004, when an Indian court ordered it to be disbursed to survivors) satisfies its financial obligations. I'm not sure that I agree, though I really don't have enough facts about the site and the terms of the 1989 settlement to have an informed opinion. It does not appear that the Indian government did a very good job of negotiating a settlement, though, and I would say that it also bears some responsibility for following up on the site cleanup. That should have been part of the settlement (for UC to do the cleanup), and UC should have been held responsible for getting the cleanup accomplished.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Union carbide IS Dow now. Their responsibility does not go away because they have a new owner / name.
When you buy a car from me, you own the car. If it was stolen, it is still stolen after you buy it.
At the time of the Bopal incident there was no significant regulations that would have prevented the same accident from happening in the US. In fact because of Bopal, the US Congress mandated that OSHA create a program to ensure such an incident never happens here. The result was OSHA's Process Safety Management standard. The standard was published in the federal register as 29 CFR 1910.119 on 24 February 1992.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
They now make all those wonderful chemicals in Charleston, WV.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Lost Sheep to Shepard, you got your ears on?
I had to study Bhopal for a business ethics class about 8 months ago. If memory serves, the plant had American managers on-site. The site underwent numerous safety inspections, and continuously failed them. Despite the prescriptions of the inspectors, nothing was ever done. At least one person in management state-side was getting reports from the inspectors, and nothing was done to encourage the managers in India to comply, or to punish them for not complying. So, yes, the on-site managers of the plant are responsible, and whoever was getting the inspection reports and ignoring them is also responsible. These are the people that should be extradited.
This article says the fake spokesperson claims to be a member of the Yes Men group, who has been doing this sort of thing for a while. But there is not confirmation of the Bhopal hoax on their site. (The hoaxster could be lying!)
Here's the salient bit from the article:
"Finisterra, whose identity could not be confirmed, later told BBC's Radio 4 he was part of the group Yes Men, which hoaxes businesses and governments and which has gone after Dow before over Bhopal."
several independent studies and investigations have been done to show that this was sabatoge.
Care to reference them? I haven't seen any such independent studies.
A BBC documentary (53 minutes in to the RM stream on the right)
says that an internal safety report on the Union Carbide MIC plant in the USA warned about the risk of a runaway reaction in MIC storage tanks just a few months before the Bhopal leak.
According to the BBC, the report was never sent to the Bhopal managers.
I'm not sure you've really thought this through. Are you seriously suggesting that a company ought to get a free pass on its misdeeds just because its ownership changes?
When your business buys another business, it comes as a package deal. You've got to take the bad along with the good. And presumably, if you're sinking however many millions into buying the company, you believe the latter outweighs the former.
I'm not sure I should even respond to a troll like this, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, to say that is preposterous is being quite generous. If you've followed any of the videos from Usama you can see that they wanted to hit the American people, not just the towers. The fact that the towers fell was beyond their greatest expectations. If they wanted to minimize the casualties, they would have crashed into the very top of the towers or attacked them at a different time of day or even attacked a different, less populated target. Saving lives was not only not a priority, it was contradictory to their plans. The plan was to attack an American icon and if civilians died, all the better.
So mod up this parent all you want, but it's not going to make it any more valid a line of arguing.
Let's just leave it at being a terrible tragedy that could (probably) have been easily avoided had the Indian or American company intervened, as they should have. Should someone be held criminally responsible? Sure. Should the people receive some of the $470 million that was paid to the Indian government? Sure. Should the victims receive more compensation (or any) directly from Dow? Sure. Is this tradegy comparable to a terrorist act? Not even remotely.
I wasn't trying to refute your memory or prove what an awesome researcher I am or what the cause of the accident or say anything else except to point out, with some humor, that you don't have to rely on your memory. Why would you even make a statement you aren't even sure is accurate? Why wouldn't you introduce at least one shred of evidence from some established authority that might back your claim up? It would take you all of 2 minutes to do that.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Survivors not compenstated: wrong. There was a settlement, but the *Indian* court system has had it tied up for years. IIRC the settlement was in the 400 million dollar range, and it did a good job of bankrupting UC.
Dow Chemical is somehow responsable: Wrong. Dow chemical bought what was left of Union carbide in the late 80's / early 90's, long after the disaster settlements had been made. Holding Dow responsable for Bhopal would be like an AMX owner suing DiamlerChrysler 20 years after getting a settlement out of AMX.
Union Carbide ran an evil nasty horrible pit of dispair of a factory. Right. Sorta. The plant fell in line with many Indian safety standards, which at the time were no where near what our standards are. Of course inspections and safety take a back seat to giving people a job in developing countries. This is nothing new.
Bhopal was a horrifying disaster, but the impression I'm getting is that India is becoming a truly western society. The scummy lawyers are shooting out of the woodwork to go after the deepest pockets. UC's former chairman stil works for Dow, but once the courts on both sides get their heads out of their asses, he'll end up facing charges in India, it's just a matter of time
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
> Were these safeguards required by law?
Unambiguously, yes. In addition to a reasonably well developed set of Health and Safety laws for a third world country, India has the usual common law system of damages for breach of duty of care, (the tort of negligence). It does not have US-style punitive or trebled damages, what is being sought here is merely the cost of putting people back into the position they were previously in, so far as the damage caused to them was forseeable by the company at the time.
The real problem here is with the corporate fashion for holding companies with large numbers of subsidiaries. As each subsidiary is nominally a separate legal person (notwithstanding, with 100% subsidiaries, the tendency for all to follow the topco's orders), the topco is able to avoid corporate responsibility.
I actually heard about this anniversary this morning on npr. There are still channels to finding important news in the US. They just aren't as popular.
Most states in the US also have good samaritan laws. Nevada is (or was, a few years ago) an exception.
(A student at UC Berkeley was in Reno with his friend. He saw his friend lure an 8-year-old girl into a men's bathroom, where the friend raped and killed her. This student would be charged under the good samaritan law in most states, but not in Nevada. There were quite a few protests aimed at getting Berkeley to dismiss him.)
Lea
That wasn't due to an evil corporation though so it doesn't count.
Article
As far as wastelands go, how about the area surrounding the 70 tons of superheated nuclear waste that blew up in 1957 in rural russia.Article
- "a chemical plant run by Union Carbide". Whoa there. India is a semi-socialist country; it has some very strict laws limiting foreign ownership and control. It would be fairer to say "a company majority owned by the Indian Government, with Union Carbide as a minor partner". I realize this doesnt fit in with the "bad multinational american companies" bogey-man, but tough.
- "released about 40 tons of a toxic gas". Maybe it would be fair to state that this was an UNINTENTONAL release, probably caused by various factors including tired workers and labor unrest.
- "...plant was in the business of creating chemicals deadly to life." Well, if you call locusts, nematodes, chiggers, termites, ants, earwigs, wasps, et al, "life", I guess thats right. But a few people think it's a good idea in a country with a marginal food supply to save a few million human lives from death by starvation by producting chemicals to kill the above-listed lifeforms, so that humans might have a chance of eating some food.
- "Safety at the plant had not been a concern of management". Hmmm, let me think, let's assume the management has no concern for human life, including their own lives or those of their workers-- they just care about making money. In order to make money in that business, you have to be able to control dozens of chemical reactions, temperatures, pressures, flow rates, valves, pumps, manifolds, etc.. If you don't have the right control systems in place everywhere, things can quickly go out of control, and your many billion dollar plant is not making pesticides, it's making a mixture of 31% water, 38% salt, and 21% brown sludge. There HAVE to be extensive mechanisms in place to prevent chemical releases, at the very least those chemicals are expensive!
- "Today, the site remains a contaminated wasteland, unusable and never cleaned up." It comes down to economics: is the cost of cleanup less than the value of the land? India is not that small that it will miss a few acres.
- "The survivors have been minimally compensated". There's a fund of $328 million dollars. If that were spread evenly over the 3,000-some families of survivors, each family would get about $100,000 each. That's about 35 years of average earnings. I wouldnt call that "minimal".
Yes, it was a bad thing that happened, but it doesnt help to misdirect blame and energy.Not entirely true. I heard a moving and thorough report this morning on National Public Radio.
Just a law student looking to reduce IANAL misstatements. While you are probably right in your conclusions (what would happen in US, etc), the current state of criminal law doesn't really recognize something as "reckless neglect". There is recklessness and there is neglect. And at any rate, recklessness or neglect is not the difference between first degree murder and second degree murder, but between murder writ large and manslaughter, a very significant difference indeed. Furthermore, that is all criminal law stuff. Corporate criminal liability is very controversial (who do you arrest? who really winds up paying the price? theories abound, but all have significant problems), corporate civil liability is not. And in many cases, corporate violations are strict liability, that is, all that is required is the bad conduct, regardless of intention. So while millions of dollars sounds like pittance, and surely not adequate to the harm, it could have the affect of destroying the company. Maybe that's enough, maybe not.
First of all, as another poster already pointed out, dihydrogen monoxide is the name most often used in parodies. Many compounds are known by more than one name.
Moreover, your reasoning is wrong IMHO, because HOH could represent a non-polar molecule if it were symmetric like this:
But as we both know, it has a V shape, with the oxygen at the bottom of the V (haven't drawn it, as the damn ecode doesn't work with spaces like pre).In fact, carbon dioxide has the structure O - C - O, but it's not polar because it's laid out in a straight line instead of a V.
I think H2O represents the structure of water better than HOH, because the two hydrogens are clearly on one side of the oxygen, not symmetrically apart. On the other hand HOH does represent the order of bonding better, but we're really talking about molecular, not structural formulae here.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
There is the concept of scapegoating at play here. Do you really thing that Anderson had anything personally to do with the actions that night? Even remotely indirectly it's a big reach.
Internal Union Carbide documents, released in the discovery phase of a civil lawsuit against the company, indicate that he and other executives had been warned by engineers of the poor safety mechanisms. A 1973 document, signed by Anderson himself, notes that the technology that would be used in the Bhopal factory was "unproven." A safety review conducted by Union Carbide experts in 1982 warned of a "serious potential for sizable releases of toxic materials" at the factory.
You can read part of the class action complaint against Anderson here.
How Politicians Lie: http://www.factcheck.org/
It was, in fact, half of a billion dollars.
Here's a suggestion. Stop opening your mouth. The less you say the smarter you look.
- dopehead. In which case, this is just about some embassies owing NYC property taxes. Well I have news for you, embassies are not part of the UN. They are part of various foreign nations. So take your beef up with those nations, not with the UN.
0 227316
You asked, "should they pay rent?"
You do realize they own the fucking building, don't you? Perhaps you were refering to real estate taxes. But if you were, then you still don't know wtf you are talking about, because the land isn't part of the US it is international territory.
I'm guessing that you are just repeating from memory some lame rant from pick-you-favorite-reactionary-celebrity-oxycontin
RE 3 billion dollars a year. You ignorant slut. Here's a good breakdown of the '03 payments:
http://www.stimson.org/fopo/?SN=FO2002
Basically our annual dues are ~300 million. We pay more to fund peacekeeping operations across the globe. Those are all operations which we chose to be involved in, you might recall we have veto power over such things. And the grand total isn't even in the ball park of 3 billion a year.
RE: Massacres - Where in the UN charter do you see a mandate to be the world's policeman. It simply isn't what the UN was formed to do. Its a straw man argument. Anyway, it has taken on a lot of peacekeeping roles, including roles in all of the places you mentioned, which pretty much makes you look ignorant again - a running theme.
Re: 21 billion dollar scandal - The report comes out in January let's wait and see. That's what my Senator, Hillary, said. Although, it ain't looking good for Kojo. Anyway, I'm not up on the scandal, maybe you can fill me in on the details, but I bet the more details you get the less it will have to do with average New Yorkers and what they ought to think of the UN being in their backyard. In otherwords, I bet it is off topic.
Re:While other countries pay little or nothing - That's like the rich bitchin about paying more in taxes than the poor. The funny thing about being a rich american is that we materially benefit more from a stable world than does some poor bastard in the third world. The key to this is 'material' as in wealth. Our wealth requires stability and so we pay to keep it. That's reality, get over it.
Quite correct. The technical term I was grasping for--but couldn't quite reach, this morning--was "depraved indifference". Deaths as a consequence of depraved indifference qualify as second-degree murder in New York state; in other jurisdictions your mileage may vary. (Here's the PDF of the standard directions to a New York jury for a depraved indifference second degree murder charge; also available the Google HTMLified version.)
Obviously, such a criminal finding might be challenging to come by. You'd have to prove that specific individuals at Union Carbide knew that their facility was unsafe, and that a fatal accident was a reasonably foreseeable outcome, and that they failed to take reasonable steps to protect the public. It is indeed a high bar to clear.
~Idarubicin
You'll want to look into something called "piercing the corporate veil," which became common in British-derived legal systems in the late 1800s. India almost certainly has a similar mechanism.
The real problem here is not knowing the details of the UC incident. The people at fault were the local managers, not the corporate head. Whereas there's no question that Dow does some scumbag things in third world countries, what caused the UC incident was a series of simple mechanical errors, including safety valves left open, stop checks (little metal plates that go into the pipe sideways) weren't in place, et cetera.
Look, I'm not defending Dow. Still, get your facts straight before you start pointing fingers. There's a good reason that this hasn't gone up the chain, and it's not because of corporate legal abuse. You would do well to watch for the History Channel special on the incident, which will give you a bunch of facts you're missing; whereas it's hardly a comprehensive view of the situation, it's fairly clear that you'd benefit from the very basics.
In this case, Dow had the safety hardware in place. Granted the underground tanks were irresponsibly large, and granted that would eventually have led to a similar catastrophe, that is not what happened here. Just because they were on the path to negligence doesn't mean that everything that goes wrong is their fault. This was local error, not international greed.
Mod parent subterranean.
StoneCypher is Full of BS