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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.
Without the monumental advances in overcoming human nature since these dark times, we wouldn't even be considering shifting regulatory responsibility from the government to the private sector. Yea, we are truly blessed to live in such an enlightened age.
fnord
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
... enough of them have died that compensation may now be in the works.
I shudder to think that this means that there are so few remaining survivors that a pay out is financially feasible for Union Carbide.
These pesticide thingies sound evil. Are you also against antibiotics?
Sadly, the Reuters story of Dow paying $12Billion is false.
If I remember correctly, the facility was down due to a labor strike prior to the release. Water snuck into a methyl isocyanate (MIC) tank and caused the reaction which led to the gas leak. I think the labor strike had a lot to do with the safety systems being down.
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
I can't believe we haven't realized that capitalism is bad, and all corporations are evil. Why can't we just have government, our savior, do everything for us. These sorts of disasters would never happen then.. Thinking of how caring and thoughtful communist governments are towards their people makes me glow green with envy... or is that just the residual radiation from the reactors at chernobyl...
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
The Bhopal plant was jointly owned by Union Carbide and the Indian government, with the government owning 51%. The plant was run by Indian workers. Most of the deaths occurred not in the town of Bhopal, but in the shanty town that went up next to the plant after the plant was built.
When you hear shit like "the terrorists hate our freedom," think of Bhopal. Around 3k people died on 9/11. In Bhopal, the lasting death toll is somewhere around 15,000. I wonder if Anderson would have been allowed to settle if 15,000 Americans had died.
Mod me down if you want, I have karma to burn. But I'd sure like to see some magnetic yellow ribbons to support the victims of US multinational homicide. Mox
If they didn't have enought people to run the plant they could have shut it down till the strike was over.
Blaming the strikers is just stupid as management made the decision to keep the plant running.
here is a link with a recent article the disaster is believed to be the result of sabotage. Also, union carbide claned up most of the site and it is now in the hands of the Indian gov. In addition they paid hundreds of millions in compensation but almost all of it was lost in the government and the victims got nothing. There are far to many sides to blame. To call the story above wrong would be a gross understatement.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
- They exist because they are legally entitled to exist.
- They exist to make money.
Therefore, they will do nothing unless they are legally compelled to do it, or unless it will make them money, either now or in the future.See this movie.
Read any good sonnets lately?
Wow. Thanks for that obscure factoid, Sparky. Pesticides kill things. Huh. Who knew?
I'm sure there's a clever comment to be had here about floods and dihydrogen monoxide here, but I'm far too weary.
--- Ban humanity.
This is not a story when technology failed..
This is a story of corruption, of not having any fail safe mechanisms or adequate safety measures, of negligence, of politicians willingly selling their souls and of those who they represent and of a system which failed to protect its own.
A thousand fingers could be pointed and in this horrible disaster, anywhere you point, you can find guilty who are still sheltered by the law, by the money they have willingly spent for their own defense and none for the people who suffered.
Union Carbide / Warren Anderson and Dow Chemical - Till now, they have chosen not to accept any form of responsibility and instead suggest sabotage. Union Carbide had spent a paltry sum before they agreed to pay 470 million of which hardly one third has been paid to its victims for the lack of any judicial oversight and sadly, corruption at the heart of the system. Even the 470 million that hopefully will be disbursed one day, hardly 2000 dollars will go to the families of those who died and 500$ to those who lost everything but their lives. Hardly a sum for the cost of a human life...
Union Carbide's response cleverly attempts to distance itself from the tragedy by calling the Bhopal plant owned by an indian firm. Clever, but it also serves to belittle the scope of this disaster and the lives that were snuffed out.
Would this be the same outcome if this had happened elsewhere, or in the developed world? And wouldnt a proper clean up in order or long completed if this were anywhere else.
Warren Anderson never saw the inside of a prison and still lives quite contently in Florida or NY and the US judicial system has done its part by denying the extradition requests by India. The Indian system on the other hand has comfortably chosen to neglect the cries for justice and has happily moved on..
Rediff.com has a sombre look at the tragedy, its victims, those who were forgotten, and those who still suffer.
One more reason not to trust corporations..
Also no additional compensation is planned and Dow has not apologized or owned up to this tragedy as the last part of the slashdot post. It is a hoax and was unknowingly perpetrated by a BBC interview. Read the AP article first (it drips accountability which is the last thing Dow or any corporation would do)and the proof its a hoax
Rapid Nirvana
I wasn't jabbing at America, I was jabbing at the lack of international justice in matters such as this.
A foreign company was responsible for large-scale devastation and deaths in thousands, and yet the management of the company get away scot-free.
Don't you think it's a little unfair? Swindling money and getting away with it (a la Enron) is one thing, but killing people and getting away with it is another.
Over 15,000 people were killed and thousands more have been scarred for life. The entire ecological system in that city is in ruins and there is no life or vegetation growing there.
There is something called responsibility for your actions. Just because you are a corporation does not excuse you from that. American or not.
"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
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.
What happened was a shame, and awful. An industrial disaster that was unmitigated in it's terror and destruction.
A nearly $500 million settlement was reached with the government of India to repair to extend possible. That's 1980's dollars, by the way. That's a lot of money in India.
A crime equally nasty is that the government in India has done virtually no good with that money.
everytime i hear DOW mentioned in this discussion it reminds me of how people can talk about something with almost no facts and jump to conclusions. The disaster was in 1984 at a union carbide plant. In 2001 DOW bough union carbide. Now, how is DOW to blame here?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
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.
As long as we continue to allow company officers to bear no responsibility for the actions of a company we will continue to see events like this. It makes no sense whatsoever that the offices should not be held accountable for the offenses of the company. They are in the position of responsibility. That word apparently doesn't mean what it used to, because they are seldom expected to actually take responsibility. They have all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks.
Personally I think that if we're not going to punish the company officers then we have only one other solution. If corporations want to be treated as a person (and in many ways they are) we should treat them as a person and accept them to assume the responsibility for their actions. Therefore if a company kills thousands of people it is a mass murderer and it should be destroyed or incarcerated permanently without chance of parole, its resources sold at auction to pay for the legal action... and maybe even to provide restitutions.
US$500M is nothing compared to even one human life lost in the pursuit of greed. Can there be any doubt that the safety measures were skimped on simply to save money? When people die due to someone's greed then the perpetrator should suffer more than a loss of money.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
When you neglect security to a point where accidents are bound to happen sooner or later, do you still not think we should hold the responsible accountable?
If you continue your line of thought, you could say that the terrorists of 11/9 only wanted to do material damage, but human lives was lost by accident.
That word apparently doesn't mean what it used to, because they are seldom expected to actually take responsibility. They have all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks.
If a person is head of a multi-national company with 150,000 employees, is that person personally criminally liable for the actions of every single employee?
Additionally, you claim that if one life is lost in the pursuit of profit they person responsible should be in jail. Fine if you think that. But that's every accidental industrial accident, ever. For the right amount of money any accident can be prevented. Period. Any. There isn't an industrial accident that couldn't be prevent given the right amount of cash. Any death at the hands of a corporation in your system would require the CEO to be imprisoned.
Corporations have limited liability for a reason. It is impossible to run a large company and not have issues of wrong-doing come up in the company. We need large companies. Large companies were not possible before limited-liability companies were concieved.
9/11 was a direct attack. Bhopal was an accident. Analogies are dangerous when missused.
Blatant disregard for safety procedures and lax management make accidents? If I blatantly disregard the law and fail to secure my child in a seat belt, then get into an accident, I am criminally liable for his injuries. If I oversaw a chemical plant, failed to ensure safety systems were online and safety precautions were taken by my workers, and an "accident" occurred, I should be liable.
9/11 could be the same thing -- our government had information but failed to act on it. As far as I am concerned, our government is criminally liable for failing to do *anything* about 9/11 before it happened, even if just acknowledging the possibility and making a token gesture by alerting the FBI.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Guilt by criminal negligence is still guilt. Terrorists killed people because of their beliefs. The men who piloted those planes thought they were doing good, and believed in it enough to die with their targets. Monstrous, but true. Plus, their supporters and organisation were properly punished for it (except, of course, the conspicuously free mastermind).
Those 15,000 Indians were not killed for any such passionate reasons - they simply weren't worth enough to bother protecting. They were killed for money, for the price of a few intelligent safety measures. The perpetrators of that crime not only didn't die in its commission, they haven't been punished.
"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
Yes, actually, I do think he was responsible for the events that transpired. The plant was designed with many safety systems to prevent a release of toxic chemicals, however, the plant was operating with most of those systems disabled. That's deliberate and criminal negligence on the part of the company officers because they knew the systems were disabled and put their profits ahead of the safety of both their employees and everyone living in the surrounding area.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
This is true, but it does not absolve Union Carbide and its executives of responsibility. On 9/11, the deaths were the result of a deliberate attempt to kill. In Bhopal, the deaths were a foreseeable result of reckless neglect of safety and concern only for money. In the United States, that would be roughly the difference between first- and second-degree murder*.
If a similar accident took place on U.S. soil, the press, the public, and the politicians would be screaming for blood. Do you think that Dow Chemical could 'accidentally' release a few tons of (say) chlorine, kill a couple thousand people, and then close the book on it with a million or two in settlements and a mea culpa?
*Yes, yes. IANAL.
~Idarubicin
Here's a question to ask.
So, a company builds a plant and generates a whole bunch of binders full of safety procedures.
They then hire people who've got experience in chemical manufacturing and train them on the excepted way to run the plant (based off of the safety procedures).
Now, when these people don't follow procedures, don't keep equipment properly maintained and an accident (such as not closing a value so that when the system was flushed out with water, water would inavertently enter a tank full of a chemical that reacts explosively with water, whose fault is it?
Is it the fault of the operators of the plant?
Is it the fault of the company for not doing enough oversight?
I don't know enough about the Bhopal accident, but I'm suspecting it was probably a bit inbetween.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
If a person is head of a multi-national company with 150,000 employees, is that person personally criminally liable for the actions of every single employee?
He is responsible for having procedures in place that it does not happen.
I diasgree a little. I don't think someone can be held responsible for inaction. Lets say you're in a grocery store and it gets held up. The grocery clerk can't take me in because I hid in the corner. You could have helped, and didn't and are therefore responsible? no.
However, if someone is flagrantly negligent, then its another story. For example, If I have a factory with a machine. Workers are paid to use this machine. I fail in my duties to maintain the machine and it explodes injuring workers. That is my fault because I failed to perform my duty to the best of my abilities.
What it comes down to is responsibility. UC had a responsibility to make the plant safer and not explode. They failed and are responsible for the effects. 9/11 they have a responsibility to protect the country. In order to hold anyone liable you have to examine each individuals personal responsibility and then evaluate how well they performed vs. how they could have performed and what the effects of their failures where. A much more complicated affair.
As for the grocery clerk, I'm not responsible for his security.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Conversely, I suppose it doesn't matter to you if someone in such a position is negligent and willfully does such things to increase profit? Seriously, this country is filled with nothing but corporate brainwashed fools.
If you are the Captain of the ship, you should go down with the ship.
"If a person is head of a multi-national company with 150,000 employees, is that person personally criminally liable for the actions of every single employee?"
If he's negligent in properly running the factory, yes. He is the boss. That's why he gets paid big dollars. If he's not doing his job then he should pay the price. If he can't handle the responsibility then he has no business being in that position. However, if the incident occurs due to the failure of a single workman, then sure he's off the hook. This disaster was due to gross negligence that took place undoubtedly at the behest of the senior executive staff of the company. They should pay. They should pay dearly.
Corporations and the people who work for those corporations need to be held responsible for their actions. This shit goes too damn far.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
Let's not forget that the reason Union Carbide was in there to begin with was because the Indian government created an environment where western companies could pay workers less than market wages, have lax environmental laws, and pretty much run a shoddy operation in order to get money. That business in India could have easily been located in the United States, but, instead, the Indian government allows its workers to be payed less and treated worse to get its competitive advantage. Declaring the head of Union Carbide a fugitive and playing victim is a red herring designed to cover the tracks of a completely corrupt system that is designed to elevate one caste while others are expendable. If you want to prevent Bhopals, insist that foreign governments have rules to make companies paying the same wages and same safety standards as their western counterparts.
This is my sig.
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.
Sometime accidents just happen, but when 4000+ people are dead, we should probably find out how.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
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
As soon as I heard that it was a hoax, I thought of The Yes Men. I recently got a chance to see the documentary about them. After taking on George W Bush and the WTO (including one of them being interviewed on CNBC Europe as a WTO spokesperson), this seemed like a logical target and a logical method of attack. So I checked out their site. There wasn't anything in the news section, but it turns out they've had a previous run-in with Dow Chemical. Yeah, I think it's pretty likely that The Yes Men are the ones behind the hoax.
Why not compare?
Osama believes the lives of thousands of innocent Americans are less important than his insane plans for Islam.
The US believes the lives of thousands of innocent Indians are less important than avoiding a precedent of holding corporations and their executives accountable for mass slaughter.
Our position on corporate negligence is no less despicable than Osama's on terrorism, and at least as deadly.
BTW, an accident is only an accident if you shoulder responsiblity for it. If you shirk it, then it becomes something worse.
Play Command HQ online
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/
Right, and somehow I doubt the terrorits' scheme took only 8 months to cook up. A good chunk of this was going on under Clinton's watch.
Now, I do agree that more head should have rolled though, particularly in the CIA...
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."