Word: tanks
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...known as the "iron fist" policy, came painfully close to America's TV screens last week. As Israeli forces stepped up their attacks on Shi'ite villages, two members of a CBS News camera crew were killed and a third was seriously injured by a shell from an Israeli tank. The three men, all Lebanese citizens, had been photographing a burned-out car outside the village of Kfar Melki that was under attack by an Israeli raiding party. CBS sent off a protest to Israel's Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, for what the network said had been described by eyewitnesses...
That statement reflected the view of French Journalist Marine Jacquemin, who had been standing near the CBS crew. She said that the Israeli tank crew "saw me, and I have long blond hair; I couldn't have been Lebanese." She continued: "They saw we were journalists. We were filming and interviewing, and they shot at us deliberately." Peres expressed his condolences but said the CBS crew had taken positions "in the midst of a group of armed men who were engaged in active hostility" against Israeli troops. He rejected any suggestion that the incident "was anything but a derivative...
Union Carbide's investigation in Bhopal focused on a partially buried tank holding more than 10,000 gal. of methyl isocyanate (MIC), a highly toxic chemical used in the manufacture of Sevin, Temik and other pesticides. The sealed tank was designed to keep the deadly MIC refrigerated and isolated from the environment. But on the night of Dec. 2, a series of runaway chemical reactions heated the interior of the tank to 400 degreesF, causing an escape valve to burst open and release a lethal cloud of vapor over the slums of Bhopal...
What triggered the reaction? Analyzing residue from the bottom of the tank, Union Carbide investigators determined that the culprit "with high probability" was water. Either by accident or design, they said, a large quantity of water had been poured into the holding tank, reacting with the MIC to produce enough heat and pressure to pop the valve. One possible source: a utility station where a pipe marked "water" is located next to one marked "nitrogen" (used to pressurize the tank). Most likely, the investigators suggested, someone connected the wrong pipe to the tank, allowing as much...
Even then, tragedy might have been averted were it not for an extraordinary series of mishaps and oversights. A refrigeration unit that might have kept temperatures in the tank at a manageable level had broken down more than five months earlier and never been repaired. A temperature alarm, which would have alerted workers to the trouble, had not been properly set. A flare tower that could have destroyed some of the escaping gas was out of commission. And a "scrubber," designed to neutralize toxic vapors, was not turned on until after the reaction had raced out of control...