Word: bhopal
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This stereotype of glamour and prestige never seems so unreal as when a correspondent is confronted by overwhelming, stomach-wrenching misery and death. New Delhi Bureau Chief Dean Brelis faced such a scene last week when he arrived in Bhopal, India, just 30 hours after a toxic gas leak had created the world's worst industrial disaster. "I have seen men killed in battle," Brelis reported after walking through streets littered with the corpses of people and animals. "But seeing ordinary people dying before your eyes, especially mute children falling dead in a transfixed silence, is appalling. I felt...
...ensure the world's safety and advancement. India provided some specimen days last week. On Monday the death toll was 410. On Friday, more than 2,500. By the weekend, numbers had no meaning any more, since no one could tell how many of the citizens of Bhopal who managed to survive the leaking toxic gas would eventually be counted among the dead. Something went very wrong at the Union Carbide pesticide plant. Human progress came up against human frailty. The air was poisoned, and the world gasped...
...fact, the world's tragedy that occurred in Bhopal, not only because one saw fellow mortals stricken but because the industrialized society has created a shared fragility. The sources of enhancement are also the sources of fear and peril-all the chemical plants, nuclear power plants and other strangely shaped structures concocting potential salvation and destruction in remote and quiet places. The citizens of Bhopal lived near the Union Carbide plant because they sought to live there. The plant provided jobs, the pesticide more food. Bhopal was a modern parable of the risks and rewards originally engendered...
...world felt especially close to Bhopal last week, it may be because the world is Bhopal, a place where the occupational hazard is modern life. History teaches that there is no avoiding that hazard, and no point in trying; one only trusts that the gods in the machines will give a good deal more than they take away. But the problem is not purely mystical either. If social advancement lies in something as lethal as methyl isocyanate, it only argues for handling with the greatest care. After this tragedy is out of the news, and the lawsuits are filed...
...first sign that something was wrong came at 11 p.m. A worker at the Union Carbide pesticide plant on the outskirts of Bhopal (pop. 672,000), an industrial city 466 miles south of New Delhi, noticed that pressure was building up in a tank containing 45 tons of methyl isocyanate, a deadly chemical used to make pesticides. At 56 minutes past midnight, the substance began escaping into the air from a faulty valve. For almost an hour, the gas formed a vast, dense fog of death that drifted toward Bhopal...