The Chemical Industry's Bhopal Legacy

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The Chemical Industry's Bhopal Legacy

 

By Gary Cohen, AlterNet

December 3, 2003

 

Nineteen years ago this week, families in Bhopal, India were awakened in the

middle of the night by terrible burning in their eyes and lungs. Within minutes,

children and mothers and fathers staggered into the street, gasping for air and

blinded by the chemicals that seared their eyes. As they ran in terror, someone

shouted that the Union Carbide pesticides factory had exploded, spewing

poisonous gas throughout the city.

 

 

 

Soon thousands of people lay dead in the city's main roads. Every truck, taxi

and ox cart was weighted down with injured and terrified refugees. No one in the

emergency room at the city hospital knew what the toxic gases were or how to

treat the thousands of patients that flooded into the hallways.

 

 

 

By morning, more than 5,000 people were dead, while a half million more were

injured.

 

 

 

Bhopal has rightly been called the Hiroshima of the chemical industry. It not

only tells the stark story of the human fall-out from a chemical factory

explosion born of supreme negligence but offers up important lessons about the

continuing failure of the chemical industry and government to address the

security and public health threats posed by dangerous chemicals.

 

 

 

The day after the disaster, Union Carbide's CEO Warren Anderson flew to India to

assess the damage his company had visited upon its Indian neighbors. He was

promptly met at the airport and arrested. After a few days he was released and

allowed to return to the United States. Anderson has not returned to India

since. There is an outstanding warrant for his arrest and a pending criminal

homicide case against him and other Carbide officials in the Bhopal courts. The

Indian government has even issued extradition orders for Anderson, but the U.S.

government has so far ignored the extradition request. This complete lack of

respect for the law reinforces the image of the chemical industry as a renegade

industry that is largely uncontrollable.

 

 

 

Nineteen years have passed, but today in Bhopal thousands of people remain sick

from chemical exposure, while more than 50,000 are disabled due to their

injuries. The amount of compensation Union Carbide paid to the survivors has not

been enough to cover basic medicines, let alone other costs associated with

various disabilities and inability to work. The sad reality is that we continue

to learn about chemicals by exposing large numbers of people to them.

 

 

 

We have learned about dioxin contamination by poisoning American veterans and

the entire Vietnamese population with Agent Orange. We have learned about

asbestos by killing off thousands of workers to lung disease. And we have

learned about the long-term effects of methyl-isocyanate (MIC) by spewing it

across an entire city in India. There are many other examples of this kind of

uncontrolled chemical experimentation. In most cases, the industry rarely pays

the full cost of the massive damage it has caused.

 

 

 

The abandoned factory site in Bhopal remains essentially the same as the day

that Carbide's employees ran for their lives. Sacks of unused pesticides lay

strewn in storerooms; toxic waste litters the grounds and continues to leak into

the neighborhood well water supply. The buildings themselves are ghostly, a

rotting monument to the excesses of the pesticide revolution in India and the

lack of corporate responsibility for its failures.

 

 

 

Officials at Dow Chemical, the new owners of Union Carbide, claim they have

nothing to do with the ongoing disaster in Bhopal – neither the pending criminal

case, the environmental contamination, nor the public health fall-out. Yet Dow

has set aside $2 billion to address Carbide's asbestos liabilities, another

public health legacy of the former chemical giant.

 

 

 

The chemical industry has always viewed Bhopal purely as a public relations

disaster; a powerful symbol that demonstrated the industry was a menace and a

threat to people's health and safety. In order to head off further regulation,

the chemical manufacturers created a voluntary program called " Responsible Care "

with the logo, " Don't Trust Us, Track Us. " In this way, the industry has avoided

any serious restrictions on its chemicals for nearly 20 years.

 

 

 

During this time lapse, we have continued to learn more about the dark side of

the chemical revolution. We have learned that today we all carry the chemical

industry's toxic products in our bodies. Every man, women and child in America

has a " body burden " of chemicals that are linked to cancer, birth defects,

asthma, learning disabilities and other diseases. We are all guinea pigs in an

epic uncontrolled chemical experiment run by Dow, Monsanto, DuPont and other

petrochemical companies.

 

 

 

If we woke up one morning and learned that this chemical invasion was the work

of foreign terrorists, the federal government would be completely mobilized to

defend our citizens from this chemical warfare threat. But because the

perpetrators are some of President Bush's most generous contributors and ardent

collaborators, we are left defenseless as a nation against this chemical

security threat.

 

 

 

Recently, it's become even harder to track the chemical industry, since it has

been working with the Bush Administration behind the veil of homeland security

to conceal information about the " worst case disaster " for its facilities and

the health threat posed by its products. But the picture that is emerging is a

frightening one.

 

 

 

According to federal government sources, there are 123 chemical facilities

nationwide that could kill at least one million people if they accidentally

exploded or were attacked by terrorists. Some of these chemical factories are

located in major American cities and put as many as 8 million lives at risk. Yet

the chemical industry continues to resist any meaningful regulation that would

require it to replace the most dangerous chemicals with safer alternatives. A

recent " 60 Minutes " expose vividly showed that many facilities lack even the

most basic security protection, yet the government is spending billions of our

tax dollars looking for chemical terrorists overseas.

 

 

 

We don't have to look in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. They are right

here, in our neighborhoods, in our food and in our bodies.

 

 

 

On this 19th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, survivors in Bhopal will march

and make speeches and demand their basic rights to be free of chemical poisons,

to be compensated for their damages, and to hold the chemical industry

responsible for the world's worst industrial disaster.

 

 

 

Despite their ongoing victimization, people in Bhopal have not given up. Their

protests are testimony to the triumph of memory over forgetting and the

celebration of the human spirit over the rationalized tyranny of corporate

profit margins and evasion of responsibility.

 

 

 

The Bhopal survivors are speaking for us as well. In the last two decades,

Bhopal has come much closer to home. The chemical terror they experienced and

the lack of care and respect they have received are a haunting reminder that we

also live under a similar poison cloud.

 

 

 

Gary Cohen is the executive director of the Environmental Health Fund in Boston.

He serves on the international advisory board of the Sambhavna Trust, which

operates a free medical clinic for the survivors in Bhopal.

 

 

 

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