Word: tanks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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, the tanks were also equipped with thermostats, valves and other devices...
...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...
Almost two hours before the gas escaped, a workman noticed that the temperature in the tanks was well above 100° F and rising steadily. As a result, pressure in the tanks was mounting. The worker tried to manually operate the mechanisms that were supposed to relieve the pressure, but it had already gone too high. He alerted his supervisor, and four colleagues donned gas masks and hurried to the scene. They too were unable to seal the tank; by then, all systems had failed...
...supervisor in the factory to do battle with the fumes. The man, identified later as Shakeel Ahmed, collapsed from the effects of the gas before he could control it. (At week's end his condition was critical.) Nearly an hour after the gas began escaping into the air, the tank was sealed by engineers from another company, Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., sent in by local authorities. By that time, however, all the gas had escaped...