Word: sites
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Flixborough on Humberside, England, June 1, 1974. Britain's biggest peacetime explosion occurred at the Nypro (U.K.) Ltd. chemical plant when a pipe ruptured. The plant produced Caprolactum, which is woven into nylon. The blast killed 28 workers and leveled every building on the 60-acre site...
...escaped from a Union Carbide plant, was of the primary variety. Such violent, large-scale tragedies are dramatic and terrible, but extremely rare, particularly in developed nations like the U.S. The occasional deaths that do occur in those mishaps are almost always confined to employees who were on-site at the time. "There are a lot of accidents in which two dozen miners are killed," says a spokesman for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in Washington. "But fortunately, there have been damn few in which great numbers of civilians have been involved...
...Whenever possible, chemical companies have tried to build factories away from population centers. Especially overseas, those factories often become magnets, attracting other business and housing. Says Jeffrey Leonard, senior associate at the Washington-based Conservation Foundation: "Many plants are located on the outskirts of cities only to have the sites overrun by bursting populations." Union Carbide officials point out that the Bhopal factory was built in the early 1970s on a site surrounded by unused public land, but a community grew up around it. At the .Pemex plant in Mexico, where an explosion killed at least 452 people last month...
...permanent residents are black; an additional 300 people are handicapped and live at a local rehabilitation center; and 4,000 students attend nearby West Virginia State College. The town has three restaurants, two gas stations, one barbershop and a sprawling Union Carbide plant. It is the only site in the U.S. that produces methyl isocyanate, the deadly chemical that wafted through Bhopal, India...
...countries, from Nigeria to New Zealand, where it has factories and the 130 nations in which it sells products. In West Germany, protesters last week spray-painted the words POISONERS and PIGS on the walls of a Union Carbide plant and dropped two gasoline bombs at the site. One exploded, but there were no injuries...