Case Study: Environmental Racism in Bhopal, India

                    By Emma Vowels

            

            The Bhopal disaster occurred in 1984, when the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant suffered a gas leak. Thousands of people in Bhopal were exposed to methyl isocyanate gas and other chemicals. The leak happened during the night, while most people were asleep. Because the gas that had been leaked was dense, it fell closer to the ground. This meant that people sleeping in low-lying beds and children who were shorter were disproportionately exposed to the hazardous gas. The initial effects of exposure were coughing, vomiting, severe eye irritation and a feeling of suffocation. Many residents of Bhopal awoke with these symptoms, and panicked, running away from the plant and further increasing their negative exposure to the gas. The exact death toll from the horrors in Bhopal is still unknown. The immediate death toll after the leak was 2,259, and the government has confirmed 3,787 deaths from the gas leak. Other estimates speculate that while around 3,000 people died within weeks, as many as 8,000 people may have died from gas-related diseases. More recent estimates say that as many as 25,000 people may have died in the disaster.

            The Union Carbide plant originally was established in India because the American company Union Carbide Corporation was looking for a place to build a plant with little regulation and a cheap labor force. Bhopal was selected as the ideal location because the native people could supply a strong workforce and the company assumed the Indian civilians would know little about the dangers of pesticide production. As a result of Union Carbide’s construction of the plant, thousands of Indian people lost their lives and the community in Bhopal was ripped apart.

            The causes of the Bhopal disaster have been cited as the use of the deadly chemical methyl isocyanate, the location of the plant near a highly populated area, the storage of the chemicals in a few large containers instead of several smaller ones, poor in plant safety mechanisms, and inadequate means to communicate with the community in the event of a disaster. All of the causes of the disaster could have been preventable, and much of the risky plant structure may have been known by Union Carbide. A few months before the disaster, the Union Carbide officials had been warned by their own regulators that many of the safety mechanisms were in place but not working. Freon had been taken out of the refrigeration systems, toxic scrubbers, which would purge the air, were turned off and water spray, which would snatch hazardous airborne chemicals, could not reach the toxic gas plumes. The company chose to ignore these serious warnings because of their demand for profit and little regard for the Indian community they were exploiting. For many years since the disaster, legal action has been taken against Union Carbide. In 1989, Union Carbide agreed to pay $470 million for damages caused in the Bhopal disaster, 15% of the original $3 billion claimed in the lawsuit. This settlement only paid out, on average, $2,200 to families of the dead. The Indian community in Bhopal continues to suffer from the disaster as research begins to show that almost every aspect of their environment is contaminated with toxic chemicals. Future generations in Bhopal will continue to pay for the disregard Union Carbide had for its exploited Indian workforce.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

Photo From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster