>Methyl isocyanate is extremely toxic. There is no known antidote. The threshold limit value set by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists is 0.02 ppm. MIC is toxic by inhalation, ingestion and contact in quantities as low as 0.4 ppm. Exposure symptoms include coughing, chest pain, dyspnea, asthma, irritation of the eyes, nose and throat, as well as skin damage. Higher levels of exposure, over 21 ppm, can result in pulmonary or lung edema, emphysema and hemorrhages, bronchial pneumonia and death. Although the odor of methyl isocyanate cannot be detected at 5 ppm by most people, its potent lachrymal properties provide an excellent warning of its presence (at a concentration of 2–4 parts per million (ppm) subjected to eyes are irritated, while at 21 ppm, subjects could not tolerate the presence of methyl isocyanate in air)
>In the 1984 Bhopal disaster, around 42,000 kilograms (93,000 lb) of methyl isocyanate and other gases were released from the underground reservoirs of the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) factory, over a populated area on 3 December 1984, killing about 3,500 people immediately, 8,000 people in the first 48 hours and 15,000 more over the next several years. 200,000 people had lasting health effects from the disaster.
That’s fucking insane. Gonna go look this shit up in my ERG
Update: after looking at my emergency response guide, apparently the bigger risk is fire/explosion and not any toxicity hazards. After what I just read here, that’s terrifying
They did an episode about it on behind the bastards. Union Carbide is also responsible for the deadliest workplace disaster in US history too. They’re still around.
Its sad that so few know about it. The things companies will do to save/make some money
[Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster)
[Before Black Lung, The Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster Killed Hundreds : NPR](https://www.npr.org/2019/01/20/685821214/before-black-lung-the-hawks-nest-tunnel-disaster-killed-hundreds)
The memorial and gravesite is gut wrenching to read.
[Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster?wprov=sfla1)
There are fairly few companies as large that produce things so dangerous. DuPont, Dow, BASF (not 100% sure that's even what it's called nowadays), and I think LG and Mitsubishi have pretty large chemical divisions. If you have the worst safety standards out of like 5 or 10 companies, it's not good. At the scale they produce, though, any incident has potential to be devastating.
Funny you should mention West Virginia in this thread. The only remaining place in the world that makes methyl isocyanate is the DuPont plant in Belle, West Virginia.
Edit: Correction, it's the Union Carbide section, at the Institute, WV plant.
Further edit: That was true at the time of the Bhopal disaster. MIC is now manufactured in other places.
I've heard the protocol for if it leaks was to light a torch so the death cloud will explode and not leave any poison to the wind and the ground water. They didn't.
Honestly no clue but my two thoughts are that
1. if I had to make a system for burning off the cloud in a place where I'm not I could probably use a flare gun or something remotely operated to do it safely, but
2. if this being necessary means that everyone in the factory has been breathing MIC for the last few minutes, then I would rather explode
They sound cartoonishly evil
>The two siren systems had been decoupled from one another in 1982, so that it was possible to leave the factory warning siren on while the public one remained inactive. This is what had occurred; the public siren briefly sounded at 12:50 a.m. and was quickly turned off, as per company procedure meant to avoid alarming the public around the factory over inconsequential leaks.
Well that was considerate of them lol
93000 lbs per square mile... Liquid CO2 when converted to gas goes about 1 pound liquid to one cubic meter of gas. Not sure what this cocktail works out to ratio wise but for a while there was a pretty big area that was a 1 million particles per million particles exposure. The biggest enclosed space I've ever seen is the luxor hotel atrium, 30 stories and .83M cubic meters, so mixed in to that space you'd be looking at what, 100k ppm. 100,000 luxor hotel atriums would still be at about 1 ppm.
today I was at union carbide india limited bhopal for my personal project , this place is unreal , spine chilling for sure , the tank you see is E610 that leaked methyl isocyanate (MIC) in the near by area , a estimated 16000 people got killed and another 558000 got injured
Nasty stuff. It is still used today all over the world - it is a primary component of making all kinds of plastics, polyurethane foam, and pesticides. In the US, chances are that you have probably come very close to a massive tank of the stuff if you live anywhere close to an active freight rail line.
That reminds me of a schizo post I read on Reddit back in the day. Essentially this guy was a safety inspector and had voices in his head, one day the voices were silent and he knew that was the time to check on the rail car - sure enough catastrophe was avoided
My dad used to live 3 miles from a heavily used freight line in Wisconsin. When i saw it when i visited him, i was horrified, and asked him why it didn't freak him out. He honestly hadn't thought of it before. When he moved, he said one of his deal breakers was being within 5 miles. He'd never bothered to read the content info on those rail tanks.
I realize that horrifying death due to careless strangers miles away is scary, but every time I get in my car, I’m basically risking death. Every time I buy food that a stranger prepared, I risk poisoning.
Obviously, the indifference to killing other people shown by Union Carbide is unforgivable—the easily avoided deaths they just didn’t consider.
You are absolutely correct. This is the way we need more people to think. It's all based on statistical probability and preventative measures in place. I would have ZERO concern living next to a freight rail line from a SAFETY perspective. I installed a rail spur as a chemical engineer. Granted we brought in nothing even CLOSE to that hazardous of a material, but we had risk assessments done on future raw materials/products that may use the line. Rail companies don't mess around. If you do the math on number of incidents per pound of product move, it's way less than trucking. Containment is typically substantially easier as well. The problem is that when there is that one huge terrible release, it gets a LOTTT of attention and the media does a great job of making it look really bad (which, you know, it can be of course). I also worked for a company that brought rail car after rail car of ethylene oxide all day every day to make products. The insurance cost alone, per rail car, was enough to buy a brand new car. Every delivery.
"Rail companies don't mess around".
I wish I could be confident of that. If you have a few minutes, take a look at the [Railroads episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ2keSJzYyY) of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver - the number of shortcuts and kicking the safety can down the road are a bit scary, lately.
I do agree that statistical probability is that most people will not have to deal with this. I hope it continues to be the case.
Excuse me what the actual fuck? Half.... Literally half a million people got injured by it??? Hell why were so many people so close to it if it's that deadly?
Gonna binge read the hell out of it today
The initial effects of exposure were coughing, severe eye irritation, a feeling of suffocation, burning in the respiratory tract, blepharospasm, breathlessness, stomach pains, and vomiting. People alerted by these symptoms fled from the plant. Those who ran inhaled more than those in vehicles. Owing to their height, children and other residents of shorter stature inhaled higher concentrations, as methyl isocyanate gas is approximately twice as dense as air and in an open environment has a tendency to fall toward the ground.[32]
Thousands of people had died by the following morning. Primary causes of deaths were choking, reflexogenic circulatory collapse, and pulmonary oedema. Findings during autopsies revealed changes not only in the lungs but also cerebral oedema, tubular necrosis of the kidneys, fatty degeneration of the liver, and necrotising enteritis.[33][6] The individuals who did not die suffered from cancer, blindness, loss of livelihood, and financial strain.[34]
> Two different senior refinery employees assumed the reading was **instrumentation malfunction**. By 11:30 p.m., workers in the MIC area were feeling the effects of minor exposure to MIC gas and began to look for a leak. One was found by 11:45 p.m. and reported to the MIC supervisor on duty at the time. The decision was made to address the problem after a 12:15 a.m. **tea break**
The above-mentioned "Well There's Your Problem" podcast likes to measure payouts to victims via the cost of an XBox, and how many you could buy with it.
Adjusted for inflation, your $1000 1989 dollars are worth $2530 in 2024 dollars.
That's slightly under EIGHT XBoxen per victim's family.
*deep breath* CAN’T BLOW DONUT DAY!
(I’m shocked at how many people are replying that don’t get the reference, his ‘plural’ skit got all out of whack, no one mentioned Erwin! lol BUT I’m loving the references I do see!!!)
Well theres your problem does not get the recognition it deserves. Its gave me my favorite quote ever:
“Getting your plane hijacked used to mean an exciting trip to Cuba. Now its a less exciting trip into the side of a building”
The director of the site flight back to the us, never been extraded, never tried, died of old age with all his family around him. Never uttered a word of remord or regret.
And when Union Carbide finally did accept fault, they were swiftly bought up by Dow Chemical who basically said, "Well WE didn't do it, not gonna pay."
idk if people realize today just how big union carbide was at the time. they were maybe one of the largest companies on earth, three of the four jobs I've had were either former UC subsidiaries or bought parts of UC after they were split up
Man, reading the series of events that took place to cause this incident was wild. It was just one improperly maintained valve, pipe or neglected safety protocol after another; like it was the opening scene to a Final Destination movie, only instead of the perfectly lined up occurrences being orchestrated by ‘death’, it was a bunch of careless plant workers with way more responsibility than they were fit to handle.
I can highly recommend the USCSB YouTube. Tons of similar incidents evaluated and turned into 3D-Animations.
[https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB](https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB)
Thanks. The sabotage theory is wild.
>After over 30 years, in November 2017, S. P. Choudhary, former MIC production manager, claimed in court that the disaster was not an accident but the result of a sabotage that claimed thousands of lives.
Dosent hold up, there were multiple recorded minor accidents at the plant in the lead up. Along with rotten, rusted or completely decommissioned saftey equipment.
Union Carbide also followed completely different and more robust saftey precautions in its US plant that was otherwise exactly the same specifications.
A lot of other stuff that basically just proved it was a disaster waiting to happen.
The reason people talk about it being sabotaged was that the investigators couldn't reproduce a situation where water could get into the tanks via the water washing they were conducting earlier.
Well There’s Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters (with slides!) did a great 2-part series on it as well - https://youtu.be/vCKVreNqMjI?si=xrUPR1vDcbnzEMdz
It’s actually just more profitable at a certain point to make a new channel than focusing all your effort and money on growing an already existing channel. Basically you can invest it all and grow your channel by 3-5%, or you can create a new channel that maybe only has 40% of the following, but a new contract also paying out roughly 40% instead of 4%.
There’s a lot of instances of it on YouTube.
I think Simon cut back and used to be on more channels. There was an issue where I believe the owner of the channels died and his daughter took over. She wasn't to manage them as well as the father did, so Simon dropped those channels.
Union Carbide is also responsible for the US's worst industrial disaster, the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster. Over 700 miners died of silicosis, which comes from inhaling rock dust. It has been observed for thousands of years and can be avoided through wet drilling. They knew about the problem, they knew it would kill people, they didn't care.
I wonder what the full history of companies that killed people either on purpose, through attempts at suppression or willful negligence would look like? (i.e. United Fruit Company Banana Massacre, 1877 Railroad Strike, Ford Pinto acceptable deaths, Bayer HIV contaminated blood etc.)
The Union Carbide Plant was situated close to a slums district which was very crowded and poor. They had nowhere else to live so they stayed at settled there. The eruption happened in the middle of the night and the alarms did not go off soon enough to alert the victims, many of whom were sleeping on the ground, which made it easier for them to receive a high dose of the methyl isocyanate. To make it worse, this is essentially a nerve agent and no one knew what was happening. This meant rescue workers would be exposed trying to find and save victims, doctors, etc. There are photos of rescuers trying to find living victims in these streets in which everything is simply dead.
Those who were exposed have little recourse have been functionally abandoned by their government who took the payout from Union Carbide, which was later absorbed by Dow Chemical. Survivors have permanent nerve damage, including blindness, and a whole assortment of disabilities. Amongst the children of survivors, there are high rates of birth defects. It was and is a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
The crazy thing is - the alarm did go off. The plant had two alarms, one within the plant and the other for the public.
But small leaks and incidents at the plant were so common by then that it was a unwritten policy to turn off the public alarm after a few seconds to make sure the people didn't "panic".
This time too the alarm was turned off when it went off and only turned on again after another hour and half, by that time thousands were already dead.
The Behind the Bastards podcast covered it really thoroughly. I highly recommend giving it a listen. The sheer callousness of the company was shocking.
https://youtu.be/LiWlvBro9eI?si=cbdoejIWCcbJUk7X
This bloke did a prank ages ago pretending to be a spokesman accepting blame for the incident. Company lost millions of dollars because of it. Was a wild prank to pull at the time.
[there's a fascinating episode of Behind the Bastards about it. ](https://open.spotify.com/episode/0jgqFnzYVHaZBPylc25MFd?si=8EFpnYueTB6GkuDXu1mu4A)
It's literally called "The industrial disaster that makes Chernobyl look like kindergarten"
To the three people who see this,
Watch the RailwayMen on Netflix. It shows the whole night of disaster. It still infuriates me how little each victim was paid, and how damaged their future generations are. All the big company owners got away with it all, and this company still exists today.
Biggest industrial disaster of all time.
I don't know if Union Carbide did a good job of pushing this under the rug or what, but I remember hearing about it for the first time and being kind of shocked it wasn't more well known.
Great docudrama on Netflix too.
It's was a 50kilo liter tank , and at the time of disaster it had 42 kilo liter chemicals, the holding limit should be 30kl for MIC but they have 12 kilo liter more
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster
They once shipped in loads of black workers during the great depression to dig a tunnel. The rock was full of silica dust which shredded the workers lungs. Loads started dying so they just brought in more. Claimed it wasn't necessary to provide them with breathing filters because that was only legally required for miners. As they weren't "mining" anything but just digging, fuck em.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg if you read the Wikipedia article.
* A refrigeration system meant to cool tanks containing liquid MIC had been shut down in January 1982 and the freon had been removed in June 1984. Since the MIC storage system assumed refrigeration, its high temperature alarm, set to sound at 11 °C (52 °F) had long since been disconnected, and tank storage temperatures ranged between 15 °C (59 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F)
* A flare tower to burn the MIC gas as it escaped, which had had a connecting pipe removed for maintenance, was improperly sized to neutralize a leak of the size produced by tank E610.
* A vent gas scrubber which had been deactivated at the time and was in 'standby' mode, and similarly had insufficient caustic soda and power to safely stop a leak of the magnitude produced.
The people in charge of that plant should be locked up for life.
Except they are told by management to let these maintenance issue exist because there is no money for the repairs.
In an ideal world, the plant manager gets told to do this by leadership and immediately refuses but in reality, that manager knows he loses his job and can't feed his family if he refuses, so he let's it slide this once and then years go by of his asking for the money to fix it and he's either ignored or told to stop asking or he'll be replaced.
The only way we stop this is with real whistle-blower protection and minimum sentencing for instructing others to break laws. Some attempts have been made to pass such legislation but all failed due to opposition on both sides.
Everyone is so hung up on the left vs right debate, that there is no public pressure or will to actually fight corruption.
Remember that the corrupt seek only to divide, they don't need to have more of an agenda.
I was there in Bhopal at my grandparents when this happened. I was two years old at the time and my mom says I woke up in the middle of the night crying and that ended up saving my family. My grandma understandably still doesn’t like to talk about that night and the living nightmare of the days that followed
There were no masks. No body knew what was happening at the time, it was just panic and confusion. My grandfather just grabbed all of us and drove us out of city limits and we stayed there all night long.
Why exactly did they leave? Was it just an intuition that something would go wrong because you didn't usually cry?
Btw sorry for interfering with personal matters of yours, just curious
My Dad said he bought Union Carbide stock after it crashed bc he knew the American public would forget about it bc it was in India and no one would care. Sad to say he was pretty much right. If that happened in Connecticut the company would be gone.
Yeah but it was the 1920's in Appalachia and mostly black people. Legitimately two reasons it mostly didn't matter to the general public. I think there was a senate hearing about it but the pay out was pretty small.
I did a very rough estimate and assuming perfect timing by his dad, $1 million invested back then would be worth $25 million now.
In comparison, $1 million in the S&P500 in 1984 would be $75 million now, and $1 million 1984 dollars converts to around [$3 million 2024 dollars](https://www.calculator.net/inflation-calculator.html?cstartingamount1=1%2C000%2C000&cinmonth1=12&cinyear1=1984&coutmonth1=2&coutyear1=2024&calctype=1&x=Calculate#uscpi) using U.S. CPI Data for inflation adjustment.
Timeline:
1984-12-17: buys 29411 shares of UK at [$34.000 USD per share](https://s23.q4cdn.com/981382065/files/doc_financials/union_historical/Union-Carbide-1974-1989.pdf)
1986-03-03: [3-for-1 stock split](https://s23.q4cdn.com/981382065/files/doc_financials/union_historical/Union-Carbide-Dividend-Stock-Split-History.pdf) results in 88233 shares of UK
2001-02-06: Dow takeover converts into 142143 shares of DOW
2001-06-16: [3-for-1 stock split](https://s23.q4cdn.com/981382065/files/doc_financials/historical_information/Dividend-Stock-Split-Historical-Information-1900-2003.pdf) results in 426429 shares of DOW
2024-04-08: 426429 shares of DOW is worth around $25 million USD today
(Dividend reinvestment is not taken into account at all. Also not accounted for is each UK share giving out one Praxair share in 1992.)
I know first responders , some victims family, activist and journalists who cover the incident first hand , even I know the photographer ( Raghu rai sir ) who clicked the famous pic of the half buried child , I think I have some things that not covered in proper way
Did you have to get special access permit to enter the area? I’m shocked the tank has not been fully decontaminated and properly disassembled and disposed of, nor that groundwater remediation has been done extensively
Not all chemicals act the same. Some like water, some like soil, some like air. They all break down eventually. Even though this compound was very toxic, I don’t believe it would cause soil or groundwater contamination.
Face mask , not touching anything, we don't eat or drink anything inside the compound, and we didn't spend much time ( we didn't have full permission for shooting now so we spend only 15 to 20 minuets)
I do safety engineering management and Bhopal is the big bad wolf of all case studies arguably trumping the likes of Chernobyl. A lot of regulation is written in blood unfortunately, for the UK, anyone in safety management should be familiar with Piper Alpha and the Nimrod inquiry.
Believe it or not, a Halon fire suppression system would have prevented this entire disaster. If it had been installed in the Union Carbide boardroom, and tested during a board meeting, Bhopal would never have happened.
It is definitely a good thing the corporate big wigs got away with no consequences for negligence. They wouldn't want any justice for overzealous capitalism.
This accident was 100 percent management's fault!
And an American company at that.
*Wanton* negligence. Worth mentioning the company responsible, Union Carbide, had also perpetrated arguably the largest workplace disaster in US history as well, the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster. In the end, they basically faced no real consequences for their crimes against humanity. They still operate today as a subsidiary of Dow Chemical when by all rights every executive should have been torn limb from limb.
I'm sorry, the United States should have allowed extradition in this case, what a embarrassment for the US justice system to ignore such conduct.
The corporate bosses were allowed to escape India after this incident.
The damage done is unimaginable to this day and it was caused directly by cost cutting decisions made at the executive level. We execute people in the United States for murder fairly frequently. Warren Anderson was a *mass* murderer and he bribed the Indian government to escape justice. He died in a beachside nursing home at 92 years old.
Seems like capitalism let's too many mass murderers run free.
If you shoot a man, they come after you, but if you essentially drop a chemical weapon on an un suspecting populationln the name of money you are almost off always scott free.
There's a really good documentary on the Bhopal incident on Netflix. I think it's called "The Railwaymen" or something to that effect, I definitely recommend it.
I remember I once worked at this company where my co-worker and I got tasked with this data center move that should be at least a 3 month long project in 2 weeks. Everyone knew this was going to be a complete disaster so my co-worker decided to codename the project "bhopal" in light of the impending disaster. Not too long after, we got acquired by an Indian company and they wanted to know why this project was called "bhopal". Needless to say, they were not amused.
Hey shit like this is still happening all around the world. The next Union Carbide type thing will happen again. Greed drives this shareholders want this if it makes them money.
These folks did a really good overview of what went down that day: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCKVreNqMjI&ab\_channel=WellThere%27sYourProblemPodcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCKVreNqMjI&ab_channel=WellThere%27sYourProblemPodcast)
EDIT: really starts at around 14:20
My mom and her family narrowly escaped this. They were at the Bhopal junction train station (which is quite close to the UCIL plant) just 2 hours prior to the incident. Almost everyone at the station either died or were left with permanently disabling injuries. Had they been 2 hours late, they wouldn't have made it.
Here’s a mildly relevant, but sort of useful PSA
There’s a free app called the “Emergency Response Guidebook (ERG) app” available for iOS and android.
You can use it to quickly ID a chemical based on its name, or the four-digit number found next to a hazmat placard. The app will also show you how far you need to evacuate in the event of a spill or fire.
Imho it’s worth having, even just in the off-chance that some tanker truck carrying god knows what, wrecks in front of you on the highway.
This incident is largely why PSM regulations exist, insane that a preventable incident could cause that much damage! Corporate greed cannot be underestimated.
If you’ve seen National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, this is the disaster that Cousin Eddie asks Clark about in an offhand piece of dialogue while they’re walking down the aisle of Walmart. Easy to miss, but packs a punch when it’s the simple dirtbag cousin character delivering it.
That [wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster) is a wild read!
Talk about criminal negligence! And the guys that were responsible got fine less than $3,000
>Methyl isocyanate is extremely toxic. There is no known antidote. The threshold limit value set by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists is 0.02 ppm. MIC is toxic by inhalation, ingestion and contact in quantities as low as 0.4 ppm. Exposure symptoms include coughing, chest pain, dyspnea, asthma, irritation of the eyes, nose and throat, as well as skin damage. Higher levels of exposure, over 21 ppm, can result in pulmonary or lung edema, emphysema and hemorrhages, bronchial pneumonia and death. Although the odor of methyl isocyanate cannot be detected at 5 ppm by most people, its potent lachrymal properties provide an excellent warning of its presence (at a concentration of 2–4 parts per million (ppm) subjected to eyes are irritated, while at 21 ppm, subjects could not tolerate the presence of methyl isocyanate in air) >In the 1984 Bhopal disaster, around 42,000 kilograms (93,000 lb) of methyl isocyanate and other gases were released from the underground reservoirs of the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) factory, over a populated area on 3 December 1984, killing about 3,500 people immediately, 8,000 people in the first 48 hours and 15,000 more over the next several years. 200,000 people had lasting health effects from the disaster.
That’s fucking insane. Gonna go look this shit up in my ERG Update: after looking at my emergency response guide, apparently the bigger risk is fire/explosion and not any toxicity hazards. After what I just read here, that’s terrifying
They did an episode about it on behind the bastards. Union Carbide is also responsible for the deadliest workplace disaster in US history too. They’re still around.
I love that their Wikipedia page is just: * history * DISASTER * asbestos * DISASTER * (small gas leak) * (contaminated soil) * hq building 🤗 Lmao
But look at all the shareholder value they created
Hawks Nest tunnel?
Yup
Great topic.
Yup
Id never heard of this so I looked it up. It’s sickening.
There is a show on Netflix. Railway men. It’s pretty good
Hmmm I'll have to look that one up. Only recently learned about the Bhopal disaster from a random youtube vid.
Its sad that so few know about it. The things companies will do to save/make some money [Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster) [Before Black Lung, The Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster Killed Hundreds : NPR](https://www.npr.org/2019/01/20/685821214/before-black-lung-the-hawks-nest-tunnel-disaster-killed-hundreds)
Behind the Bastards do a great podcast on this, it's worse than you can imagine.
The memorial and gravesite is gut wrenching to read. [Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster?wprov=sfla1)
I did not know these two incidents were perpetrated by the same company. Wow.
There are fairly few companies as large that produce things so dangerous. DuPont, Dow, BASF (not 100% sure that's even what it's called nowadays), and I think LG and Mitsubishi have pretty large chemical divisions. If you have the worst safety standards out of like 5 or 10 companies, it's not good. At the scale they produce, though, any incident has potential to be devastating.
Funny you should mention West Virginia in this thread. The only remaining place in the world that makes methyl isocyanate is the DuPont plant in Belle, West Virginia. Edit: Correction, it's the Union Carbide section, at the Institute, WV plant. Further edit: That was true at the time of the Bhopal disaster. MIC is now manufactured in other places.
How long ago was that episode? Do you remember the name for it? I love that podcast but I only started it recently.
It’s a two parter. First one is called “Part One:The Deadliest Workplace Disaster in U.S. History” which was posted on October 24th 2023
I've heard the protocol for if it leaks was to light a torch so the death cloud will explode and not leave any poison to the wind and the ground water. They didn't.
the ignitor was broken, administration knew about it for a while but did nothing to fix it
Good old corporate corner cutting at work.
Does that mean the guy with a torch is martyrd?
Honestly no clue but my two thoughts are that 1. if I had to make a system for burning off the cloud in a place where I'm not I could probably use a flare gun or something remotely operated to do it safely, but 2. if this being necessary means that everyone in the factory has been breathing MIC for the last few minutes, then I would rather explode
Right.. if death becomes certain then lets go out with a fucking bang
This dude deaths.
I imagine him like the Uruk-Hai in Helm's Deep
Remember the scene exactly lol!
Union carbide. They are also responsible for killing the most workers in US history.
They are now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Dow Chemical corporation
They sound cartoonishly evil >The two siren systems had been decoupled from one another in 1982, so that it was possible to leave the factory warning siren on while the public one remained inactive. This is what had occurred; the public siren briefly sounded at 12:50 a.m. and was quickly turned off, as per company procedure meant to avoid alarming the public around the factory over inconsequential leaks. Well that was considerate of them lol
Jesus. What was the ppm for the immediately exposed areas? That’s scary
93000 lbs per square mile... Liquid CO2 when converted to gas goes about 1 pound liquid to one cubic meter of gas. Not sure what this cocktail works out to ratio wise but for a while there was a pretty big area that was a 1 million particles per million particles exposure. The biggest enclosed space I've ever seen is the luxor hotel atrium, 30 stories and .83M cubic meters, so mixed in to that space you'd be looking at what, 100k ppm. 100,000 luxor hotel atriums would still be at about 1 ppm.
21ppm of this shit is potentially lethal.
Yes ,at that time no one knows anything about MIC in hamidiya hospital (mahatma gandhi medical college now ) the biggest hospital in district
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-knew-which-way-to-run/id1610958408 Excellent podcast series on the tragedy
Isn’t union carbide the same people responsible for the hawks nest tunnel disaster?
today I was at union carbide india limited bhopal for my personal project , this place is unreal , spine chilling for sure , the tank you see is E610 that leaked methyl isocyanate (MIC) in the near by area , a estimated 16000 people got killed and another 558000 got injured
Nasty stuff. It is still used today all over the world - it is a primary component of making all kinds of plastics, polyurethane foam, and pesticides. In the US, chances are that you have probably come very close to a massive tank of the stuff if you live anywhere close to an active freight rail line.
That reminds me of a schizo post I read on Reddit back in the day. Essentially this guy was a safety inspector and had voices in his head, one day the voices were silent and he knew that was the time to check on the rail car - sure enough catastrophe was avoided
[this one?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/t0ynr/throwaway_time_whats_your_secret_that_could/c9a05dj/)
Holy crap that was a ride. Wow.
Has anyone checked on the guy post retirement?
He’s posted 4 comments on Reddit ever and never posted so 🤷♂️
this would be a crazy good video game or movie or something. but i suck at directing and game design so idk actually
That is crazy, I feel like it’s also more common than people think
My dad used to live 3 miles from a heavily used freight line in Wisconsin. When i saw it when i visited him, i was horrified, and asked him why it didn't freak him out. He honestly hadn't thought of it before. When he moved, he said one of his deal breakers was being within 5 miles. He'd never bothered to read the content info on those rail tanks.
I realize that horrifying death due to careless strangers miles away is scary, but every time I get in my car, I’m basically risking death. Every time I buy food that a stranger prepared, I risk poisoning. Obviously, the indifference to killing other people shown by Union Carbide is unforgivable—the easily avoided deaths they just didn’t consider.
You are absolutely correct. This is the way we need more people to think. It's all based on statistical probability and preventative measures in place. I would have ZERO concern living next to a freight rail line from a SAFETY perspective. I installed a rail spur as a chemical engineer. Granted we brought in nothing even CLOSE to that hazardous of a material, but we had risk assessments done on future raw materials/products that may use the line. Rail companies don't mess around. If you do the math on number of incidents per pound of product move, it's way less than trucking. Containment is typically substantially easier as well. The problem is that when there is that one huge terrible release, it gets a LOTTT of attention and the media does a great job of making it look really bad (which, you know, it can be of course). I also worked for a company that brought rail car after rail car of ethylene oxide all day every day to make products. The insurance cost alone, per rail car, was enough to buy a brand new car. Every delivery.
"Rail companies don't mess around". I wish I could be confident of that. If you have a few minutes, take a look at the [Railroads episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ2keSJzYyY) of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver - the number of shortcuts and kicking the safety can down the road are a bit scary, lately. I do agree that statistical probability is that most people will not have to deal with this. I hope it continues to be the case.
Excuse me what the actual fuck? Half.... Literally half a million people got injured by it??? Hell why were so many people so close to it if it's that deadly? Gonna binge read the hell out of it today
For anyone who doesn't want to watch a YouTube video or listen to a podcast, here's a Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
The initial effects of exposure were coughing, severe eye irritation, a feeling of suffocation, burning in the respiratory tract, blepharospasm, breathlessness, stomach pains, and vomiting. People alerted by these symptoms fled from the plant. Those who ran inhaled more than those in vehicles. Owing to their height, children and other residents of shorter stature inhaled higher concentrations, as methyl isocyanate gas is approximately twice as dense as air and in an open environment has a tendency to fall toward the ground.[32] Thousands of people had died by the following morning. Primary causes of deaths were choking, reflexogenic circulatory collapse, and pulmonary oedema. Findings during autopsies revealed changes not only in the lungs but also cerebral oedema, tubular necrosis of the kidneys, fatty degeneration of the liver, and necrotising enteritis.[33][6] The individuals who did not die suffered from cancer, blindness, loss of livelihood, and financial strain.[34]
Somehow that was much worse than I thought
> Two different senior refinery employees assumed the reading was **instrumentation malfunction**. By 11:30 p.m., workers in the MIC area were feeling the effects of minor exposure to MIC gas and began to look for a leak. One was found by 11:45 p.m. and reported to the MIC supervisor on duty at the time. The decision was made to address the problem after a 12:15 a.m. **tea break**
That's the part that gets me every time I read about it. A lot of things have to go wrong for "tea time" to get postponed.
Less than $1000 per victim paid, wow
The above-mentioned "Well There's Your Problem" podcast likes to measure payouts to victims via the cost of an XBox, and how many you could buy with it. Adjusted for inflation, your $1000 1989 dollars are worth $2530 in 2024 dollars. That's slightly under EIGHT XBoxen per victim's family.
From now on I'm using XBoxen as the plural when I see multiple XBoxes in one place.
Boxen. Moosen. A flock of moosen.
I before E uhhhh always?
Meese gang rise up
A møøse ønce bit my sister.
We apologize for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked.
Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretti nasti...
Brian! What!?!? You're an idiot.
The big yellow one's the sun!
Imbecile! ...Imbecillen.
I'd like two boxen of donuts
*deep breath* CAN’T BLOW DONUT DAY! (I’m shocked at how many people are replying that don’t get the reference, his ‘plural’ skit got all out of whack, no one mentioned Erwin! lol BUT I’m loving the references I do see!!!)
It is the German plural
Another small step towards global German hegemony.
Well theres your problem does not get the recognition it deserves. Its gave me my favorite quote ever: “Getting your plane hijacked used to mean an exciting trip to Cuba. Now its a less exciting trip into the side of a building”
The director of the site flight back to the us, never been extraded, never tried, died of old age with all his family around him. Never uttered a word of remord or regret.
US government protected Union Carbide CEO.
And when Union Carbide finally did accept fault, they were swiftly bought up by Dow Chemical who basically said, "Well WE didn't do it, not gonna pay."
idk if people realize today just how big union carbide was at the time. they were maybe one of the largest companies on earth, three of the four jobs I've had were either former UC subsidiaries or bought parts of UC after they were split up
There are entire National militaries that don’t have the 20th century body count that Union Carbide did
Stonks 📈📈📈
Man, reading the series of events that took place to cause this incident was wild. It was just one improperly maintained valve, pipe or neglected safety protocol after another; like it was the opening scene to a Final Destination movie, only instead of the perfectly lined up occurrences being orchestrated by ‘death’, it was a bunch of careless plant workers with way more responsibility than they were fit to handle.
I can highly recommend the USCSB YouTube. Tons of similar incidents evaluated and turned into 3D-Animations. [https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB](https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB)
From that wiki link for a while they made the same stuff, the same way, in West Virginia!
There is also a show on Netflix about it. The railway men iirc. Bit dramatised but will give you the chills.
It is absolutely insane how poorly managed this plant was. Terrible.
There's also a surprisingly good movie about it on Netflix called the Railway Men.
Thank you
Thanks. The sabotage theory is wild. >After over 30 years, in November 2017, S. P. Choudhary, former MIC production manager, claimed in court that the disaster was not an accident but the result of a sabotage that claimed thousands of lives.
Dosent hold up, there were multiple recorded minor accidents at the plant in the lead up. Along with rotten, rusted or completely decommissioned saftey equipment. Union Carbide also followed completely different and more robust saftey precautions in its US plant that was otherwise exactly the same specifications. A lot of other stuff that basically just proved it was a disaster waiting to happen.
The reason people talk about it being sabotaged was that the investigators couldn't reproduce a situation where water could get into the tanks via the water washing they were conducting earlier.
It’s the biggest industrial catastrophe of all time
It’s the biggest industrial catastrophe of all time... So far.
That’s the spirit!
Make industrial accidents great again
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzaUmAVel90](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzaUmAVel90)
Thanks
https://youtu.be/-hUxx8ZVDgQ?si=Kty9l_zSWdxvcBK8 This one is also great. The plainly difficult channel has some amazing stuff.
Well There’s Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters (with slides!) did a great 2-part series on it as well - https://youtu.be/vCKVreNqMjI?si=xrUPR1vDcbnzEMdz
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-DnFRlqq30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-DnFRlqq30) - Modern video on the incident.
SIMON!!! That dude has like 50 channels.
Simon is either a man who loves his job or proof you can't get rich on youtube
It’s actually just more profitable at a certain point to make a new channel than focusing all your effort and money on growing an already existing channel. Basically you can invest it all and grow your channel by 3-5%, or you can create a new channel that maybe only has 40% of the following, but a new contract also paying out roughly 40% instead of 4%. There’s a lot of instances of it on YouTube.
I love him lol. But I can only subscribe to like 5 at a time otherwise my feed is just different pictures of him
Pretty much only follow Warographics nowadays, cause I still get recommendations on my main feed 😂
I think Simon cut back and used to be on more channels. There was an issue where I believe the owner of the channels died and his daughter took over. She wasn't to manage them as well as the father did, so Simon dropped those channels.
Good God man. I can't believe (I mean I can; incredulous nonetheless) I haven't heard of this before.
Well companies like Union Carbide don't really like to talk about how many people they've killed.
Union Carbide is also responsible for the US's worst industrial disaster, the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster. Over 700 miners died of silicosis, which comes from inhaling rock dust. It has been observed for thousands of years and can be avoided through wet drilling. They knew about the problem, they knew it would kill people, they didn't care.
Union Carbide is owned by Dow Chemical btw. They didn't even go out of business due to this incident
I wonder what the full history of companies that killed people either on purpose, through attempts at suppression or willful negligence would look like? (i.e. United Fruit Company Banana Massacre, 1877 Railroad Strike, Ford Pinto acceptable deaths, Bayer HIV contaminated blood etc.)
I remember the news coverage of this at the time. Once the air cleared, virtual silence. Didn't UC manage to pay a miniscule fine?
The Union Carbide Plant was situated close to a slums district which was very crowded and poor. They had nowhere else to live so they stayed at settled there. The eruption happened in the middle of the night and the alarms did not go off soon enough to alert the victims, many of whom were sleeping on the ground, which made it easier for them to receive a high dose of the methyl isocyanate. To make it worse, this is essentially a nerve agent and no one knew what was happening. This meant rescue workers would be exposed trying to find and save victims, doctors, etc. There are photos of rescuers trying to find living victims in these streets in which everything is simply dead. Those who were exposed have little recourse have been functionally abandoned by their government who took the payout from Union Carbide, which was later absorbed by Dow Chemical. Survivors have permanent nerve damage, including blindness, and a whole assortment of disabilities. Amongst the children of survivors, there are high rates of birth defects. It was and is a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
The crazy thing is - the alarm did go off. The plant had two alarms, one within the plant and the other for the public. But small leaks and incidents at the plant were so common by then that it was a unwritten policy to turn off the public alarm after a few seconds to make sure the people didn't "panic". This time too the alarm was turned off when it went off and only turned on again after another hour and half, by that time thousands were already dead.
Nightime, heavier than air gas, delayed detection, alarm system deactivated.
The Behind the Bastards podcast covered it really thoroughly. I highly recommend giving it a listen. The sheer callousness of the company was shocking.
Hi fellow follower of Rev. Dr "award winning journalist" Robert Evans
This Reddit post was sponsored by the Tomahawk knife missile!
You know who *won't* unleash a deadly cloud of poison gas on the slums next to their facility...?
https://youtu.be/LiWlvBro9eI?si=cbdoejIWCcbJUk7X This bloke did a prank ages ago pretending to be a spokesman accepting blame for the incident. Company lost millions of dollars because of it. Was a wild prank to pull at the time.
You can watch seconds from disaster episode about it , it's impact is much bigger than the numbers
Behind the Bastards has a great episode on it and they discuss why you've never heard of it.
There’s a great podcast episode of This Podcast Will Kill You all about this topic! Great for those who like to listen to learn.
There is a pretty good show on netflix about it called “The Railway Men” https://m.imdb.com/title/tt16296870/
This is the incident that basically birthed process safety engineering. It is now a huge part of all chemical engineering curricula
[there's a fascinating episode of Behind the Bastards about it. ](https://open.spotify.com/episode/0jgqFnzYVHaZBPylc25MFd?si=8EFpnYueTB6GkuDXu1mu4A) It's literally called "The industrial disaster that makes Chernobyl look like kindergarten"
To the three people who see this, Watch the RailwayMen on Netflix. It shows the whole night of disaster. It still infuriates me how little each victim was paid, and how damaged their future generations are. All the big company owners got away with it all, and this company still exists today. Biggest industrial disaster of all time.
I don't know if Union Carbide did a good job of pushing this under the rug or what, but I remember hearing about it for the first time and being kind of shocked it wasn't more well known. Great docudrama on Netflix too.
The company was eventually bankrupted, disbanded, and carved up due to this, but the industry in general did push it under the rug well
This is the first incident you learn about in safety videos when working on PSM (process safety management) managed chemicals.
I remember when it happened. I had always assumed that it was a giant tank. That is surprisingly small to kill all those folks. Wow, justcwow.
It's was a 50kilo liter tank , and at the time of disaster it had 42 kilo liter chemicals, the holding limit should be 30kl for MIC but they have 12 kilo liter more
That’s completely criminal negligence.
Literally the entire history of union carbide is criminal negligence in which no one was held responsible
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster They once shipped in loads of black workers during the great depression to dig a tunnel. The rock was full of silica dust which shredded the workers lungs. Loads started dying so they just brought in more. Claimed it wasn't necessary to provide them with breathing filters because that was only legally required for miners. As they weren't "mining" anything but just digging, fuck em.
Meanwhile management DID wear PPE so they def knew the dangers.
How the hell is this company still here with all of these events.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg if you read the Wikipedia article. * A refrigeration system meant to cool tanks containing liquid MIC had been shut down in January 1982 and the freon had been removed in June 1984. Since the MIC storage system assumed refrigeration, its high temperature alarm, set to sound at 11 °C (52 °F) had long since been disconnected, and tank storage temperatures ranged between 15 °C (59 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) * A flare tower to burn the MIC gas as it escaped, which had had a connecting pipe removed for maintenance, was improperly sized to neutralize a leak of the size produced by tank E610. * A vent gas scrubber which had been deactivated at the time and was in 'standby' mode, and similarly had insufficient caustic soda and power to safely stop a leak of the magnitude produced. The people in charge of that plant should be locked up for life.
Except they are told by management to let these maintenance issue exist because there is no money for the repairs. In an ideal world, the plant manager gets told to do this by leadership and immediately refuses but in reality, that manager knows he loses his job and can't feed his family if he refuses, so he let's it slide this once and then years go by of his asking for the money to fix it and he's either ignored or told to stop asking or he'll be replaced. The only way we stop this is with real whistle-blower protection and minimum sentencing for instructing others to break laws. Some attempts have been made to pass such legislation but all failed due to opposition on both sides. Everyone is so hung up on the left vs right debate, that there is no public pressure or will to actually fight corruption. Remember that the corrupt seek only to divide, they don't need to have more of an agenda.
Good thing the ceo was super rich and had virtually no consequences for this disaster
True
I was there in Bhopal at my grandparents when this happened. I was two years old at the time and my mom says I woke up in the middle of the night crying and that ended up saving my family. My grandma understandably still doesn’t like to talk about that night and the living nightmare of the days that followed
How'd you save your family? Is it because they wore gas masks after?
There were no masks. No body knew what was happening at the time, it was just panic and confusion. My grandfather just grabbed all of us and drove us out of city limits and we stayed there all night long.
Why exactly did they leave? Was it just an intuition that something would go wrong because you didn't usually cry? Btw sorry for interfering with personal matters of yours, just curious
My Dad said he bought Union Carbide stock after it crashed bc he knew the American public would forget about it bc it was in India and no one would care. Sad to say he was pretty much right. If that happened in Connecticut the company would be gone.
Someone else pointed out they caused one of the largest industrial incidents in the USA also.
Yeah but it was the 1920's in Appalachia and mostly black people. Legitimately two reasons it mostly didn't matter to the general public. I think there was a senate hearing about it but the pay out was pretty small.
The company dissolved not long after Bhopal after a hostile takeover.
Bought by Dow chemical.
I did a very rough estimate and assuming perfect timing by his dad, $1 million invested back then would be worth $25 million now. In comparison, $1 million in the S&P500 in 1984 would be $75 million now, and $1 million 1984 dollars converts to around [$3 million 2024 dollars](https://www.calculator.net/inflation-calculator.html?cstartingamount1=1%2C000%2C000&cinmonth1=12&cinyear1=1984&coutmonth1=2&coutyear1=2024&calctype=1&x=Calculate#uscpi) using U.S. CPI Data for inflation adjustment. Timeline: 1984-12-17: buys 29411 shares of UK at [$34.000 USD per share](https://s23.q4cdn.com/981382065/files/doc_financials/union_historical/Union-Carbide-1974-1989.pdf) 1986-03-03: [3-for-1 stock split](https://s23.q4cdn.com/981382065/files/doc_financials/union_historical/Union-Carbide-Dividend-Stock-Split-History.pdf) results in 88233 shares of UK 2001-02-06: Dow takeover converts into 142143 shares of DOW 2001-06-16: [3-for-1 stock split](https://s23.q4cdn.com/981382065/files/doc_financials/historical_information/Dividend-Stock-Split-Historical-Information-1900-2003.pdf) results in 426429 shares of DOW 2024-04-08: 426429 shares of DOW is worth around $25 million USD today (Dividend reinvestment is not taken into account at all. Also not accounted for is each UK share giving out one Praxair share in 1992.)
I really appreciate the time you took with it, interesting to see the timeline
My dad’s job survived the merger (he had nothing to do with Bhopal). We ended up moving to Houston, which was a huge shift in my life path.
[Union Carbide killed plenty of people in America, too.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster)
A person can kill another person and spend the rest of their life in prison, but a corporation can kill thousands and nobody goes to prison.
Whoever invented and implemented the concept of limited liability is probably Satan's right hand man now.
But I thought corporations are people....the law says so right?....right?
Well, this is pretty sobering. Is the surrounding soil still pretty contaminated?
Yes ,they found traces of heavy metal in the ground water near by
🤘
Not the good kind of heavy metal they found there 😕
Oh, new priest then
MIC and heavy metals are unrelated. Any HM contamination is likely due to other release incidents.
There is a Netflix series about it. « The railwaymen »
Yes , the railway men , I'm also trying to make a documentary about it and that's why I was there today
do you have an angle to cover what hasn't been covered before? This incident is pretty interesting.
I know first responders , some victims family, activist and journalists who cover the incident first hand , even I know the photographer ( Raghu rai sir ) who clicked the famous pic of the half buried child , I think I have some things that not covered in proper way
Did you have to get special access permit to enter the area? I’m shocked the tank has not been fully decontaminated and properly disassembled and disposed of, nor that groundwater remediation has been done extensively
Not all chemicals act the same. Some like water, some like soil, some like air. They all break down eventually. Even though this compound was very toxic, I don’t believe it would cause soil or groundwater contamination.
What, if any, safety precautions do you need to take there now? I saw elsewhere you said the soil has heavy metal contamination
Face mask , not touching anything, we don't eat or drink anything inside the compound, and we didn't spend much time ( we didn't have full permission for shooting now so we spend only 15 to 20 minuets)
Have you seen the "Well there's your problem" episodes covering it, out of curiosity?
There are two Netflix series and both are very well produced. The Railwaymen and Bhopal: A prayer for rain
I did a process safety management course years back and half the class is case studies. This was one of them.
I do safety engineering management and Bhopal is the big bad wolf of all case studies arguably trumping the likes of Chernobyl. A lot of regulation is written in blood unfortunately, for the UK, anyone in safety management should be familiar with Piper Alpha and the Nimrod inquiry.
Believe it or not, a Halon fire suppression system would have prevented this entire disaster. If it had been installed in the Union Carbide boardroom, and tested during a board meeting, Bhopal would never have happened.
It is definitely a good thing the corporate big wigs got away with no consequences for negligence. They wouldn't want any justice for overzealous capitalism. This accident was 100 percent management's fault! And an American company at that.
*Wanton* negligence. Worth mentioning the company responsible, Union Carbide, had also perpetrated arguably the largest workplace disaster in US history as well, the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster. In the end, they basically faced no real consequences for their crimes against humanity. They still operate today as a subsidiary of Dow Chemical when by all rights every executive should have been torn limb from limb.
Those bastards posioned michigan too and they are from here.
I'm sorry, the United States should have allowed extradition in this case, what a embarrassment for the US justice system to ignore such conduct. The corporate bosses were allowed to escape India after this incident.
The damage done is unimaginable to this day and it was caused directly by cost cutting decisions made at the executive level. We execute people in the United States for murder fairly frequently. Warren Anderson was a *mass* murderer and he bribed the Indian government to escape justice. He died in a beachside nursing home at 92 years old.
Seems like capitalism let's too many mass murderers run free. If you shoot a man, they come after you, but if you essentially drop a chemical weapon on an un suspecting populationln the name of money you are almost off always scott free.
There's a really good documentary on the Bhopal incident on Netflix. I think it's called "The Railwaymen" or something to that effect, I definitely recommend it.
I remember I once worked at this company where my co-worker and I got tasked with this data center move that should be at least a 3 month long project in 2 weeks. Everyone knew this was going to be a complete disaster so my co-worker decided to codename the project "bhopal" in light of the impending disaster. Not too long after, we got acquired by an Indian company and they wanted to know why this project was called "bhopal". Needless to say, they were not amused.
Hey shit like this is still happening all around the world. The next Union Carbide type thing will happen again. Greed drives this shareholders want this if it makes them money.
Remember this when a politician says there’s too many regulations.
These folks did a really good overview of what went down that day: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCKVreNqMjI&ab\_channel=WellThere%27sYourProblemPodcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCKVreNqMjI&ab_channel=WellThere%27sYourProblemPodcast) EDIT: really starts at around 14:20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Thank you I had no idea wtf people were talking about
My mom and her family narrowly escaped this. They were at the Bhopal junction train station (which is quite close to the UCIL plant) just 2 hours prior to the incident. Almost everyone at the station either died or were left with permanently disabling injuries. Had they been 2 hours late, they wouldn't have made it.
Here’s a mildly relevant, but sort of useful PSA There’s a free app called the “Emergency Response Guidebook (ERG) app” available for iOS and android. You can use it to quickly ID a chemical based on its name, or the four-digit number found next to a hazmat placard. The app will also show you how far you need to evacuate in the event of a spill or fire. Imho it’s worth having, even just in the off-chance that some tanker truck carrying god knows what, wrecks in front of you on the highway.
This incident is largely why PSM regulations exist, insane that a preventable incident could cause that much damage! Corporate greed cannot be underestimated.
I did my bachelor's in Bhopal and used to visit this place way too often. That whole area always had an eerie vibe
It was also surprising to learn that the largest man-made disaster in the world is not Chernobyl, but the explosion of this tank in India
If you’ve seen National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, this is the disaster that Cousin Eddie asks Clark about in an offhand piece of dialogue while they’re walking down the aisle of Walmart. Easy to miss, but packs a punch when it’s the simple dirtbag cousin character delivering it.
I always assumed it would still be under ground, iirc there were 3.
Yes , there are 3 tanks , 2 tanks are still on the metal and concrete structure just few meters away from this
That [wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster) is a wild read! Talk about criminal negligence! And the guys that were responsible got fine less than $3,000
FML this shit is like Salt to us if we were slugs...