Word: bhopal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last week's disaster in Bhopal focused world attention on two highly volatile and toxic gases, methyl isocyanate and phosgene. They, along with many other chemicals, are used in the production of pesticides. Methyl isocyanate (MIC) helps produce Union Carbide's Temik, a product marketed under Robert Gordon Haines, the company's manager for new pesticides. It is one of a group of chemicals called isocyanates that are used to make polyurethane, which, in turn, is used to make paint and varnish. The MIC compound also has been made in the U.S. at Union Carbide...
...Middleport, N.Y., a small community northeast of Buffalo, elementary schoolchildren huddle over their notebooks, just 400 yards from a pesticide factory operated by the FMC Corp. A month ago a faulty pump at the neighboring plant spewed out methyl isocyanate gas, the same substance that was stored at Bhopal, India, where more than 2,500 people died last week. Firemen evacuated the 600 youngsters from the school, and 30 of them were treated for eye irritations...
...three cases face a common dilemma: industrial dangers. Those hazards can be divided into two rough categories: primary and secondary disasters. Primary disasters are the quick explosions, fires or leaks that strike with the surprise of a hurricane, killing instantly and widely. The tragedy last week at Bhopal, when deadly gas escaped from a Union Carbide plant, was of the primary variety. Such violent, large-scale tragedies are dramatic and terrible, but extremely rare, particularly in developed nations like the U.S. The occasional deaths that do occur in those mishaps are almost always confined to employees who were on-site...
...tragic wake of Bhopal, safety reviews are under way in most of the U.S., the world's biggest producer and user of MIC and other pesticides. Nearly a billion tons of pesticides and herbicides, comprising 225 different chemicals, was produced in the U.S. last year, and an additional 79 million lbs. was imported. MIC is stored or used at plants in New York, West Virginia, Texas, Alabama and Georgia. Those insecticides not dependent on the compound, like malathion, are also construct ed of toxic molecules. Dow Chemical Co., one of the nation's largest producers of agricultural...
...centers. Especially overseas, those factories often become magnets, attracting other business and housing. Says Jeffrey Leonard, senior associate at the Washington-based Conservation Foundation: "Many plants are located on the outskirts of cities only to have the sites overrun by bursting populations." Union Carbide officials point out that the Bhopal factory was built in the early 1970s on a site surrounded by unused public land, but a community grew up around it. At the .Pemex plant in Mexico, where an explosion killed at least 452 people last month, a city of shanties developed in the 20 years after the facility...