Word: bhopal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Bhopal plant had two safety devices that would operate automatically in case a tank ruptured. The first was a scrubber that would neutralize the highly reactive gas by treating it with caustic soda. If the scrubber failed to do the job, another mechanism would ignite the gas and burn it off in the air harmlessly before it could do much damage...
...deny such allegations. Yet Jackson Browning, the U.S. company's corporate director of health, safety and environmental affairs, conceded that the Indian facility lacked the computerized warning system used at a sister plant in Institute, W. Va. Moreover, according to a former Indian executive of Union Carbide India, the Bhopal plant was furnished with only one manual, back-up alarm system instead of the four-stage alarm system reportedly required...
Meanwhile, preliminary investigations by several committees, including one of Indian chemists and other experts, indicated that there had been a number of accidents at the Bhopal plant since it first went into operation in 1977. According to Chief Minister Singh, the Union Carbide facility had endured six accidents in six years before the recent tragedy. In all, he said, one worker had been killed, 47 injured and $620,000 worth of property destroyed...
...permitted to hold a majority interest, in this case 50.9%. Union Carbide has long enjoyed the favor of an Indian government eager to encourage sophisticated industry and develop the "Green Revolution" in agriculture, of which pesticides are an important ingredient. When the company built a small pesticide plant outside Bhopal in 1969, the project was approved by local authorities with the blessing of the national government. The firm was even exempted from a number of local taxes and provided with water and electricity at concessional prices...
...arose in the Madhya Pradesh state assembly in December 1982, then Labor Minister Tarasingh Viyogi took pains to remind his listeners that the plant had cost $25 million to build. "The factory is not a small stone that can be shifted elsewhere," he argued. "There is no danger to Bhopal, nor will there...