Word: bhopal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...disaster in Bhopal was the latest in a series of major industrial mishaps around the world, some with immediate fatal results, others with lingering, long-term consequences. Last week in Taiwan, leaking methane gas in a coal shaft triggered an explosion that killed 33 miners. Two weeks earlier, a liquefied-natural-gas explosion claimed 452 lives near a Mexico City shantytown. As the list of such man-made tragedies grows, concern is rising everywhere that industrial safety standards are often higher in the U.S. than in developing countries, and that some U.S. firms may have opened plants abroad to take...
Prominent among the targets of that antibusiness backlash was Union Carbide. Within hours of the accident, police in Bhopal closed the plant and arrested its manager, J. Mukund, as well as four of his colleagues, on charges of "culpable homicide through negligence." When a team of five technical experts from Union Carbide's headquarters in Danbury, Conn., arrived to inspect the factory, they were turned away by local authorities. "We don't want anyone tampering with the evidence," said an official. The Indian Central Bureau of Investigation, meanwhile, seized records and logbooks at the plant, and Chief Minister Singh ordered...
Perhaps the most spectacular government action came when Warren M. Anderson, 63, Union Carbide's U.S. chairman, flew to Bhopal later in the week. Immediately after his arrival, he and two officials of the company's Indian subsidiary were arrested and charged with "negligence and criminal corporate liability" and "criminal conspiracy," which under Indian law carries a maximum penalty of death. Instead of being taken to prison, the three executives were detained at the company's comfortable Bhopal guesthouse, surrounded by 50 armed guards to protect them from possible mob attacks, and cut off from communication with the outside world...
With national elections approaching, officials may have been playing for publicity with Anderson's arrest. The gesture may also have been intended to dramatize a growing demand among Indian politicians for Union Carbide to pay the same sort of compensation to Bhopal's victims that it would if they were Americans. Those U.S. rates, under which each claimant could typically win $100,000, are considerably higher than their Indian equivalents. At week's end, three American attorneys, including Melvin Belli, filed a lawsuit in Charleston, W. Va., on behalf of Bhopal victims, asking damages of $15 billion. Said a company...
...emerge about what went wrong at the plant. Methyl isocyanate, a colorless chemical compound that behaves in humans and animals like a potent form of tear gas (see box), is used by Union Carbide as an ingredient in producing relatively toxic pesticides known as Sevin and Temik. At the Bhopal facility it was stored in three double-walled, stainless steel tanks, buried mostly underground to limit leakage in the event of an accident and to help shield them from air temperatures that could soar to 120° F in summer. Refrigerated to keep the highly volatile gas in its liquid form...