Word: methyl
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rocked blinded children in their arms and old men convulsed in their hospital beds. The pictures were all too real. More human frailty was on display than human progress. Odd how little it takes to pick up the facts involved in so sudden a catastrophe-to learn all about "methyl isocyanate," and how the pressure built up in a storage tank too rapidly for the "scrubber" to neutralize the gas that escaped into the atmosphere. Even a tragedy becomes a moment in technology, as if we feel compelled to advance knowledge at the same time we experience shock and grief...
...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, and the dead cremated, things ought to be made considerably safer than they were before Bhopal. Human progress, human frailty. Ashes float in the air near...
...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...
...gaseous cloud released by several tons of methyl isocyanate blanketed the Indian community of 900,000 before anyone could escape. In the event of a similar Cambridge accident, however, a half kilogram of nerve gas emanating from ADL would have "some impact, but nowhere near the effect of the thing in India," says Edmund Crouch, a Harvard physicist who lent his risk-assessing skills to the local advisory group...
...lesser of two evils. In the past, farmers have used the controversial Ethylene Dibromide (EDB) as a pesticide. But scientists have determined that EDB causes cancer, and so food growing companies have been scurrying to find replacements for the dangerous chemical. The leading chemical candidates for substitutes, namely methyl bromide and aluminum phosphide, are believed to be as harmful...