Word: bhopal
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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...
...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...