IT WAS a brutal statement of a brutal tragedy. “Poison gas leaking from a pesticide plant killed more than 1000 people in central India this week, and injured more than 20 000,” our correspondent Debora MacKenzie wrote in our issue of 6 December 1984. “It was the sort of mass disaster which may become increasingly frequent as cities in the Third World grow and surround factories.”
Thankfully, that hasn’t come to pass, at least not on the scale of the leak from the plant run by a local subsidiary of the US-based chemical corporation Union Carbide in Bhopal, capital city of Madhya Pradesh. “Many of the town’s 700 000 inhabitants fled to a hill to escape the gas,” MacKenzie reported, “which eventually covered an area of 40 square kilometres.” The final death toll is unclear. In a deposition to India’s supreme court in 2010, the Indian government , with more than 500,000 non-fatal injuries. Bhopal remains the worst industrial disaster the world has ever seen.
Advertisement
The culprit was methyl isocyanate gas, an intermediate in the production of pesticides. At Bhopal, it was stored as a liquid under pressure in tanks fitted with pressure valves, spill tanks and air scrubbers. On the night of 2 December, nearly a tonne of water being used to clean pipes poured into a tank holding 40 tonnes of the chemical, resulting in a runaway reaction.
Evidence emerged within weeks that Union Carbide had known that safety systems were inadequate at the plant, incapable of preventing a leak resulting from a chemical reaction of this magnitude.
The company still maintains that sabotage was the proximate cause for the leak, however.Although court cases related to the disaster proliferated in both India and the US, the only people convicted to date have been a few Indian managers. “The case,” our correspondent Fred Pearce wrote in 2013, reflecting on the legal fallout, “remains a textbook example of the persistent failure of legal systems to hold multinational corporations to account for their failures.” Simon Ings
To find more from the archives, visit
