Word: methyl
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Union Carbide's Institute facility, one of many plants that dot West Virginia's "Chemical Valley," has been a source of public concern for almost a year. Its output includes methyl isocyanate (MIC), the gas that killed 2,500 people and injured 200,000 when it leaked from a Union Carbide unit in Bhopal, India, last December. After that horror, the manufacturer shut down Institute's MIC unit for five months and spent $5 million improving its safety and production equipment...
Ever since a leak of deadly methyl isocyanate at its plant in Bhopal, India, killed 2,500 people and injured more than 20,000 in December 1984, Union Carbide has been locked in one battle after another. Even as it faces up to $100 billion in lawsuits filed on behalf of the Bhopal victims, the Danbury Conn.-based firm (1984 sales: $9.5 billion) is struggling to fend off a hostile takeover by GAF (1984 sales: $731 million), a manufacturer of building and chemical products. In a defensive move, Carbide decided last week to sell its consumer businesses for some...
...suffered one of the worst industrial accidents of modern times. On the edge of town stood a seven-hectare pesticide plant owned by the U.S. company Union Carbide. Around midnight, water passed through a safety valve that had been deactivated and poured into a 13-meter steel tank of methyl isocyanate (MIC). The water caused a superheated reaction, turning the MIC into a deadly gas; the tank ruptured, breaking clean through its concrete housing; and 27 tons of MIC was released into the gentle southerly breeze that made kite-flying Bhopal's favorite sport. Over the next weeks, months...
...shines almost every day, palm trees sway on the boulevards--and the groundwater is poisoned. All over town, ugly drilling rigs mounted on trucks are boring 300-foot holes to trace the plumes of a pollutant that has leaked from the underground tanks of gasoline stations. The culprit: methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), an additive that makes gasoline burn cleaner but one the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has classified as a potential carcinogen. Half of Santa Monica's water supply is undrinkable--MTBE makes water taste like turpentine--and the city (pop. 85,000) faces a $300 million cleanup that...
...mercury being dumped by the illegal miners in Talawaan is a relatively stable compound that is toxic only after repeated contact. But eventually it will be converted by bacteria into methyl mercury, the far more toxic form that wreaked such damage in Minamata after the same transformation took place. Guesses about how long the process will take range from two to 10 years. But nobody disputes that the conversion will happen. And when it does, Manado will be in grave danger. In Minamata, the population subsisted largely on a diet of fish caught in their...