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.

Comments

Dow-chem chairman Warren Anderson

[metlin]

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 BBC was duped

[tagishsimon]

Sadly, the Reuters story of Dow paying $12Billion is false.

"Dow accepting full responsibility" was a hoax!

[zz99]

"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 heard a history of this on the radio

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

As one of the resident up-PC posters...

[general_re]

...compensation may now be in the works.

...let me point out that compensation was already in the works. Union Carbide paid India $480 million back in 1989 - we can certainly argue about the amount and whether it's enough, but the money was paid. The real problem there is that the Indian government kept most of the money, and didn't distribute it to or use it on behalf of the survivors. Frankly, I don't see much point in paying out any more, so long as the government of India is going to act as a sinkhole and suck down any more money that gets transferred. Sorry, but maybe this time it should be held in trust for the survivors by someone other than Indian bureaucrats.

DEAD WRONG!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:to anyone who mentions DOW

[viking099]

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).

Only the worst non-communist world accident.

[TheNarrator]

Damn Collapses in Henan Provinces in China in 1973 killed 85,000.

That wasn't due to an evil corporation though so it doesn't count.

Article

Over 85 thousand died as a result of the dam failures. There was little or no time for warnings. The wall of water was traveling at about 50 kilometers per hour or about 14 meters per second. The authorities were hampered by the fact that telephone communication was knocked out almost immediately and that they did not expect any of the "iron dams" to fail.

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

KARABOLKA, Russia - One of the world's ghastliest nuclear accidents happened just upwind of here, in a nameless atomic city that never appeared on a map, when an explosion of radioactive sludge produced a toxic plume that contaminated a quarter of a million people.