Profits spell death in India disaster

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AcTioN It was the worst industrial accident in history. While the residents slept, the poison drifted into the night air of Bhopal, India. The slums surrounding the Union Carbide plant were soon blanketed in a white shroud of methyl isocyanate (MIC), a lethal chemical used in the production of pesticides. Many people never awoke. For others the noxious fumes quickly turned the night's calm into a frenzy of terror and death.

The poisonous chemical, which belongs to a family of toxins for which there is no known antidote, claimed 2500 victims. Another 1000 people can be expected to die. The critically injured number 3000. As many as 100,000 people may be left with permanent disabilities by a chemical considered so dangerous that toxicologists are reluctant to even study it in the lab.

There is no official explanation yet of what caused the disaster, but the culpability of Union Carbide's owners for the deaths and injuries is apparent. Indian scientists from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research have confirmed that the storage tank was defective. The tank had not been tapped since October, allowing the pressure to build to a dangerous level.

of Bhopal mirror the dichotomy between the corporations and soclety's needs."

The cooling system was not supplied with the Freon gas necessary to keep the pressure from rising. As the temperature rose the chemical, which is stored in liquid form, turned to gas and escaped through a safety valve.

The scrubber mechanism designed to neutralize the gas by treating it with caustic soda was under repair and did not work. The flare tower, designed to burn off the fumes, was not lit. A critical panel in the control room had been removed, preventing the leak from showing up on monitors. There were no engineers on duty as required. And to add to the litany of irregularities, the alarm system did not go off until two hours and four minutes after the leak began.

"There seems to have been a total There were 170,000 people living in Bhopal within the 25 square miles that the gas covered, many right next to the plant. Yet as inherently unsafe as this was, there were no evacuation plans in the event of an accident. When the warning sirens belatedly sounded the alarm, many residents actually ran toward the plant, thinking it was on fire.

A Union Carbide inspector who toured the Bhopal plant in 1982 admitted that the plant was not "up to American standards."

The Bhopal plant only one manual back-up alarm system instead of the four-stage computerized alarm system at the Union Carbide plant at Institute, W. Va.

It can't happen here?

The Bhopal tragedy has renewed attention to the practice of U.S. corporations exporting products, such as proscribed drugs or sub-standard technology, to countries lacking even the inadequate regulatory mechanism existing in the United States.

"Companies often fail to maintain high environmental standards in nations without strict rules or enforcement" reports Stuart Diamond in the New York Times. "In a Union Carbide battery plant in Jakarta, Indonesia, more than half the 750 workers had kidney damage from mercury exposure. In an asbestos-cement factory partly owned by the Manville Corporation 200 miles west of Bhopal, workers in 1981 were routinely covered with asbestos dust, a practice that would never be tolerated here."

But reassurances that it can't happen here are not worth much. "We have nothing to be comforted by just because we're living in an advanced industrial society, Anthony Mazzocchi of the Workers' Policy Project told Newsweek. "On the contrary, we are at greater risk because we have more toxic plants here."

There are 6000 plants producing hazardous chemicals in this country. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that only 10 percent of the 90 million pounds of toxic wastes produced each year are disposed of properly. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that there are as many as 50,000 toxic waste dumps around the country. At least 14,000 of these sites are or soon could be dangerous.

The EPA was only last month given authority to regulate underground storage tanks such as the one that leaked in Bhopal. The EPA doesn't even know how many such tanks there are, let alone what is in them.

As it stands there are no federal regulations governing storage of toxic materials or monitoring leakage. Moreover, federal regulations do not even classify carbamates—the type of pesticides that use MIC—as hazardous waste. One hazardous-waste expert for the EPA observes that "we've got no regulations and no enforcement. The only reason we haven't had a release with the same disastrous effect is that we've been lucky."

The Reagan administration, rest assured, is doing everything possible to gut what laws do exist. One of Reagan's first acts in office was to revoke an executive order issued by President Jimmy Carter that would have imposed somewhat stricter controls on the export of "extremely hazardous" substances and required that all toxic chemicals in the workplace be identified.

Nicholas A. Ashford, director (continued on page 14, in “Ite Yes”)

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"The faces of the dead, dying, bilnded people