On December 3, 1984, a loud bang rang out in the city of Bhopal, India, and a violent explosion occurred at a pesticide factory in the area.
The high temperature and shock wave generated by the explosion instantly destroyed everything within a few hundred meters of the surrounding area, and more seriously, the pesticide gas in the factory gushed out with the explosion, and nearly 50 tons of methyl cyananate quickly spread in the Bhopal area at a speed of 5 kilometers per hour.
For a time, the Bhopal area was full of deaths and injuries, hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives or left lifelong disabilities in the accident, and the Bhopal explosion has become the world's worst chemical spill so far.
So what is the cause of all this?
Green revolution
In the sixties of the last century, the world entered a period of peaceful development, and India, a country with a long history, also began to develop rapidly.
India already has a very large population base, and with a stable social environment brought about by peacetime, India's population has begun to increase dramatically.
In addition, because of ethnic beliefs, it is very difficult to restrict the population in India, so India's population has become the largest in the world.
However, India's rapid population expansion has not kept pace with India's infrastructure and social development.
As an economically underdeveloped agricultural country, how easy is it for India to feed hundreds of millions of people in the country?
When Prime Minister Indira came to power, he embarked on the so-called "Green Revolution", which aims to use agriculture and fertilizers to increase crop yields and thus ensure India's food self-sufficiency.
However, it is not easy to greatly increase the output of pesticides and fertilizers, especially for a country like India, which is relatively backward in all aspects of economic, scientific and technological development.
In a desperate situation, India has no choice but to turn to the United States for help.
At the beginning, the Indian government only purchased the formula and technology of pesticides and fertilizers, and later the chemical companies in the United States chose to set up factories in India in order to save manpower and transportation costs.
For the sake of the development of its own agriculture, the Indian government simply acquiesced to the behavior of these companies, and did not strictly check and screen these companies, which laid the foundation for the subsequent explosion in Bhopal, India.
Among the many U.S. chemical companies that have entered the Indian market, one company, Union Carbide Ltd., has chosen to set up a plant in the Bhopal region.
At that time, the local Indian people warmly welcomed it, because they believed that this experienced chemical company would bring a huge boost to their agricultural development, and the establishment of the factory could also solve part of the employment problem of the local people.
Site selection buries hidden dangers
However, when the United Carbide Company selected the site, it encountered some people's doubts, because the location of the general chemical company is far away from the suburbs, and at the same time, it must also take into account the urban wind direction, topography and other factors, and strive to avoid the harm of chemicals to human life to the greatest extent.
What people didn't expect was that the site of this chemical company was actually chosen to be on the outskirts of the city, which was very close to the slums.
As a large multinational enterprise with a long history, Union Carbide has a very complete range of chemicals, including methyl cyanate, which is ultra-toxic, and dozens of other raw materials that contain highly toxic substances.
If such a potentially risky factory is located on the outskirts of a city with such a high population density, any accident would have been devastating.
Some local intellectuals in Bhopal saw this at the time and vigorously opposed the opening of a factory in such a location, but in the end their voices were drowned out by the cheers of the more Indian people.
Fortunately, the director of the Bhopal branch of Union Carbide is an experienced and highly safety-conscious employee, who has carried out strict safety checks on all aspects of the plant in a conscientious and responsible manner, and even set a record of 500,000 working hours without mistakes at one point.
Under the leadership of the plant manager, Union Carbide has been developing in an orderly manner and has provided a lot of pesticide and fertilizer support for agricultural development in the Bhopal area, which has won unanimous praise from the local residents.
Those who had been skeptical about the location of the factory gradually accepted the results.
Not only in the Bhopal region, but also in the whole of India, the "green revolution" has achieved remarkable results, India's agricultural output has been greatly increased, the food problem of the Indian people has finally been solved, and the basic livelihood has finally been guaranteed.
In some areas, there was a surplus of grain, which was eventually exported, and agriculture was thriving in India.
However, this prosperity has been achieved through the pollution of the land and the destruction of the environment, and it is not a long-term solution.
Of course, the environmental costs were only partial, as the danger of opening a chemical plant in a densely populated area in the Bhopal region persisted, and one day in December 1984, it finally exploded with unimaginable consequences.
Security risks have further emerged
By the 80s, the number of chemical companies in India had reached a considerable number, the market was severely saturated, and the profits of various companies were slowly decreasing, and Union Carbide Limited was no exception.
Later, for various reasons, the company's original director was transferred back to the United States, and the new director was replaced by a local employee in Bhopal.
The new factory manager is a financial background and knows the company's accounts well, but when it comes to production and safety issues, he is a little more than enough, and the safety problems of the factory began to decline at this time.
On the other hand, the saturation of the market led to a decline in the profits of Union Carbide, and the head office set a target for the branch in Bhopal to maintain a certain profit margin. In order to achieve the target, the company began to find ways to reduce costs, and did everything to achieve the goal.
The company first laid off a lot of employees, and in order to save labor costs, the company laid off some experienced employees with relevant professional knowledge, and even laid off a lot of management, and the remaining employees are all some basic employees who have no experience and do not understand professional knowledge.
The company has also begun to drastically reduce the training time for its employees, with the previous director training for new employees lasting six months and inviting highly educated professionals to come and train.
In order to save training costs, the training period of employees was reduced to half a month, and there were no highly educated and professional personnel to train, but entrusted other colleagues in the factory to come over to directly train new colleagues.
What's more, the company began to cut corners and shoddy in production, and the raw materials used in the company's production are the cheapest and the most harmful.
The company's monthly safety drills have also been canceled, and more than ten years of peace and quiet have made them relax their vigilance, mistakenly believing that accidents will not happen at all, but they don't know that the danger is already approaching step by step.
In 1982, the head office in the United States conducted a safety inspection of the Bhopal branch and found 61 safety hazards.
However, the head office did not give any instructions on these hidden dangers, and the branch office also ignored these problems as a matter of course, and everyone turned a blind eye to these potential safety hazards in order to obtain immediate benefits.
According to the subsequent "Bhopal explosion" accident investigation report, all safety systems in the plant were in a state of failure before the explosion at the plant.
The plant's fire protection system, cooling equipment, alarm bells, and protective equipment were largely unusable, and some of the safety equipment that was still working was artificially turned off on the grounds that turning off the equipment could save $30 a day.
Without any safety equipment for alarm and protection, the explosion of the factory is inevitable.
The Bhopal bombing that shocked the world
On the afternoon of December 2, 1984, Bhopal Union Carbide employees were cleaning the filters on the pipes as usual, and if normal procedures were followed, the valves of the pipes should be closed and the installation formwork should be set up before backflushing.
However, because the valve was closed and the installation template needed to be carried out with a work permit first, the staff directly flushed the pipeline in order to avoid trouble, which led to the leakage of the valve of the chemical storage tank, and in the process of flushing, the flushed sewage entered the methyl cyanalate storage tank.
The chemicals inside the tank begin to react exothermically, and the temperature and pressure inside immediately begin to rise.
At this time, the careless employees did not notice that the meter display of the storage tank had begun to appear abnormal.
The pressure and temperature of the storage tanks are getting higher and higher, and the amount of steam in the tank has exceeded the washing capacity of the storage tank by hundreds of times.
Originally, the torch alarm would have started to sound in this case, but the factory's flare system had already failed and had not been repaired for a long time.
The situation inside the storage tank was going in a bad direction, and it wasn't until the early hours of December 3 that workers discovered the leaked methyl cyanate.
The staff flashed a flashlight and slowly approached the storage tank, and he stopped more than ten meters away from the storage tank, on the one hand, because the rumble in the tank made him feel very uneasy, and he did not dare to approach any longer; on the other hand, the heat radiation in the tank had been scorched, and he couldn't bear it, and his body couldn't support it if he took a step further.
The staff member was quite responsible, and did not run away as soon as he realized that the situation was wrong, but tried to open the scrubber and quickly depressurize the storage tank, but he did not succeed.
Then, he hurried to find someone else to help.
However, at this time in the early hours of the morning, in addition to a few workers on duty in the factory, there were no other staff, in a hurry, the employee left the factory, all the way to the factory leader's house, to report the situation, but before he could run to the place, the disaster happened.
At 0:45 a.m. on December 3, the pressure and temperature of the storage tank containing 45 tons of methyl cyanate reached the limit, and the safety valve jumped, and a shocking bang woke everyone in the Bhopal area, and a huge mushroom cloud with a diameter of tens of meters appeared over the factory.
The impact of the heat wave and the explosion swept through an area of several hundred meters, and in an instant all that was left around the factory was ruins, with casualties.
What is even more terrifying is that the methyl cyanade in the storage tank began to spread unscrupulously in the city with the impact of the explosion, accompanied by gusts of east winds, the poison gas spread at a speed of 5 kilometers per hour, and the entire Bhopal area and several surrounding towns were enveloped in the poison gas.
Many Bhopal residents were awakened by the sound of the explosion and did not react to what had happened, they thought it was just an ordinary explosion, and there would be no danger after a wave of impact, but before they could reach the scene of the accident to save people, they realized that something was wrong.
Many people began to smell a pungent smell of chemicals in the air, followed by watery eyes, violent coughing, and sudden blindness.
As more and more people around them showed symptoms, the people of the Bhopal area began to panic.
However, by this time, the poison gas had spread throughout the city, and even if they ran around in the dark, they could not avoid this pervasive poison gas.
More and more people are beginning to be invaded by poison gas, showing various symptoms, and those who inhale poison gas into their bodies in the first place have already died.
The streets of the entire district of Bhopal were filled with loud crying people, and death and fear surrounded the whole city. People have nowhere to run but to rush to hospitals in droves, pinning their last hope on doctors.
At this time, the two hospitals in the Bhopal area were already overcrowded, and the lack of manpower and space were minor problems, but the biggest headache for the doctors was that they also knew nothing about the highly toxic gas.
Over the years, the Bhopal region has only been focused on agriculture, but the development of medical care has been very slow, and the safety awareness and prevention awareness of local residents are also very backward, so that the entire city has never formulated corresponding safety prevention and control measures and emergency response measures, which has led to the current situation of being overwhelmed in the face of poison gas leaks.
With no treatment options or medication for the symptoms, doctors were helpless and had no choice but to hand out gauze and towels to cover their mouths and noses, hoping that this would reduce their crying.
However, this has little effect, because even ordinary gas masks may not be completely safe in the face of highly toxic chemicals such as methyl cyanate.
The lives of the people of Bhopal are passing by every minute, some of them fell on the way to the hospital, some fell under the helpless eyes of the doctors, and many of them were suffocated by the poison before they could wake up from their dreams.
The screams of fear in the face of fear, the cries and screams of being tortured by poison gas, and the cries of watching the people around them fall one by one, the night in Bhopal seems to have become a purgatory on earth.
On the night of December 3, tens of thousands of people were killed in the Bhopal area, and almost all the remaining Bhopals were injured, and this is just the beginning.
At dawn, the government began to organize personnel to deal with the chaos.
The dead were gathered together, and the bodies were piled up layer by layer at the incineration point and cremated on the spot.
Residents who survived the accident were relocated to other areas, but in the following period, a large number of residents still died every day due to the severe poison gas infection.
Truckloads of corpses continued to be brought in from the burning site, and the burning continued for more than ten days, turning Bhopal into a dead city.
In the end, the chemical explosion killed a total of 575,000 people, and more than 200,000 people were left with lifelong disabilities due to toxic gases.
However, this is only the consequence in terms of human casualties, and more seriously, the far-reaching consequences of the poison gas explosion on the environment, water and soil, and the safety of residents in the region in the following decades.
Under the influence of poison gas, the morbidity and mortality rate of the local people in the Bhopal region have increased greatly, and there has also been a terrible phenomenon of neonatal deformities and premature death.
In 1990, India's Ministry of Health tested the soil and groundwater in Bhopal, which showed that the area still had excessive levels of toxins, and the shocking accident continues to poison the water and its inhabitants.
The Bhopal accident also shocked the world at the time, after the accident, both the Indian government and the United Nations Health Organization sent a professional team to investigate the cause, and the inspection showed that the direct cause was indeed the sewage from the flushing pipeline into the storage tank, which caused a chemical reaction of methyl cyanate, which caused the explosion.
However, through further investigation, it was found that Union Carbide had a lot of security vulnerabilities, and the scandal of Union Carbide ignoring safety in order to save costs was also known to the world.
What is even more infuriating is that the company is located on the outskirts of the city, just a step away from the unusually densely populated slums, which is a great disrespect for life! Union Carbide has been condemned by the whole world.
However, even after such a major accident, Union Carbide did not show apologies and remorse.
As a result of the ongoing litigation by the Indian government and people, Union Carbide was able to pay £280 million in compensation, which is not much to all the victims.
The eight main persons in charge of the accident were finally brought to justice after more than 20 years of litigation and trial, but what is unacceptable is that they were sentenced to only two years in prison after such a tragic case.
The Indian government and people expressed strong dissatisfaction with the verdict and continued to appeal, and finally Union Carbide was forced to spend half of the company's equity to build the hospital and compensate the people of Bhopal.
The Bhopal incident has sounded the alarm for chemical companies around the world, and I hope that all companies can take warning, not to take risks because of temporary profits, and to always be in awe of human rights and life.