Thirty Years Later, Victims of Bhopal Gas Disaster Are Still Waiting for Justice

Around midnight on the eve of December 3, 1984, a toxic gas called methyl isocyanate (MIC) that’s used in chemical manufacturing began leaking from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. There were no alarm systems in place. Devices that that might have curtailed or stopped the chemical leak were not running and more than 40 tons of the deadly gas quickly spread over the city, exposing half a million or more people. At least 8,000 people were killed immediately by the gas, which causes pulmonary edema and other acute respiratory effects. Some 20,000 have died since as a result of this chemical exposure, making Bhopal what’s considered the worst such industrial disaster ever. (Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the chemical leak vary by source, with some injury estimates as high as 600,000.) In addition to respiratory disease, methyl isocyanate also causes blindness and other severe vision problems and gas been linked to reproductive health problems, including infertility, miscarriages and stillbirths.

Photo by Bhopal Medical AppealA protest rally during the 28th anniversary of the Bhopal Gas Disaster in 2012. In the past 30 years, only seven Union Carbide officials, all local Indian hires, have been held responsible for the leak that killed thousands of people. Not a single American manager of the company has been charged.

In the years since, residents of Bhopal have continued to be exposed to toxic chemicals through water and soil contamination linked to the plant and illnesses persist, both in survivors of the 1984 disaster and children born in Bhopal since then. In 1989, Union Carbide $470 million in compensation to the victims, but that translated to only about $500 each for more than 90 percent of the victims. Activists in India are now demanding that Dow Chemical, which bought Union Carbide in 1999, pay $8 billion more in compensation.

On the 30^th anniversary of the deadly incident, organizations representing survivors, including the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, have released a list of demands aimed at repairing ongoing damages from the incident. Apart from additional compensation for the victims and their families, they are asking that Dow fully clean the contamination resulting from the Bhopal plant, and that principals responsible for the plant – either directly or through permitting, contracting and financing – be held fully accountable, including on criminal charges, for the disaster.

In the past 30 years, only seven Union Carbide officials, all local Indian hires, have been held responsible for the leak and were convicted five years ago. Not a single American manager of the company has been charged. The chairman of Union Carbide at the time of the accident, Warren Anderson, died in the US last year, putting an end to three decades of efforts to extradite him to India to face criminal charges. Meanwhile, thousands of tons of hazardous waste that remain buried at the plant site continue to pose a serious health hazard for local residents.

If you think that chances for comparable disasters and delayed justice occurring here in the US are slim, think again. Last week, activists and environmental advocates who have come together as the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters pointed out that despite measures enacted in the wake of Bhopal, industrial facilities in the US continue to endanger millions of Americans.

According to analyses by the Environmental Justice and Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform and the Center for Effective Government released earlier this year, approximately 100 million Americans — or about 1 in every 3 US residents, including school children — are currently at risk of a grave chemical disaster. This risk comes from the 3,433 facilities in the US that produce, handle, process, distribute or store extremely hazardous substances in sufficient quantities to require them to have what’s called a Risk Management Plan as required under amendments to the Clean Air Act of 1990. Low-income communities, African-American and Latino communities throughout the US are those most at risk.

Among the chemicals used at these US plants are chlorine gas, anhydrous ammonia, phosgene, hydrofluoric acid, formaldehyde, sulfur dioxide, toluene diisocyanate, and various flammable petroleum products. A number of these substances have been involved in disastrous chemical explosions and releases at US plants over the past 10 years, including last year’s incident in West, TX that killed 15 people, injured more than 200, and caused massive damage, including to more than 200 homes.

About six months after the deadly April 2013 explosion and fire, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued 24 citations to the West Fertilizer Company for serious safety violations and fined the owner $118,300. As is allowed under US law that limits the amount of fines OSHA can levy for violations, the company contested the citations and fines. OSHA records show that when the case was closed in November 2013, the number of violations had been reduced to 19 and the fines to $85,000. An investigation by the US Chemical Safety Board is ongoing and several lawsuits have been filed against the company by about 200 plaintiffs, including families of people killed and injured. Trials in these cases are scheduled to begin in July 2015.

While hazardous chemicals continue to endanger US communities, American manufacturing relies increasingly on overseas chemical production, in low-income countries that include India, where industrial pollution now kills more people than disease, according to the Global Alliance on Health and Disease.

US measures fall short

Had a chemical leak like that which occurred in Bhopal happened in the US in 1984, all of things that led to that accident — “the disabling of safety systems, improper storage of a highly toxic material, none of those things would have violated any federal or state law,” explained Mike Wright, United Steelworkers director of Health, Safety & Environment, during a call with reporters on the November 25. But, said Wright, “that’s no longer the case. We have made some significant progress since then. We have the EPA right-to-know regulations, we have the OSHA process safety management standard, we have the EPA risk management program.” Yet, these measures only “address the edges of the problem,” he said.

“The EPA program is called ‘risk management,’ not risk elimination — not even risk reduction,” noted Wright. These measures, he explained, are “basically standards which require a company to take an existing process and make it as safe as a possible.” There is, however, “no law that requires a company to change a highly hazardous process to a safer one or even to investigate if there is a safer process,” said Wright.

In other words, while the US Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, that was enacted in response to Bhopal, increased reporting requirements for facilities using dangerous substances — as do the Clean Air Act amendments — these programs do not eliminate or even necessarily reduce these hazards.

Following the West, Texas incident, President Obama issued an Executive Order aimed at improving chemical facility safety and security but the order does not create any enforceable requirements. So while certain reporting requirements are in place, no national policy yet compels companies to eliminate use of toxic chemicals like methyl isocyanate.

Ongoing safety threats

Methyl isocyanate, which is used to make what are called carbamate pesticides but also to make polyurethane foam and other plastics, was produced at a Bayer plant in West Virginia where an explosion killed two workers in 2008. The chemical compound was not released in the 2008 incident and Bayer has since discontinued methyl isocyanate production there. But had the explosion damaged tanks where methyl isocyanate was stockpiled, the disaster “would have been horrific — far worse than what happened in India,” said Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA) in a 2009 statement.

Much more recently — just two weeks ago — a leak of a chemical called methyl mercaptan that killed four workers at a DuPont plant in LaPorte, Texas also occurred at a plant that makes methyl isocyanate.

Methyl isocyanate is far from the only potentially deadly chemical that endangers workers and communities where such plants are located. That it continues to be used, however, particularly at facilities where catastrophic incidents have occurred illustrates the ongoing risks.

“Living in the shadow of Bhopal was a constant threat,” said Maya Nye, executive director of People Concerned About Chemical Safety, who grew up in West Virginia near the Bayer plant. The plant, said Nye, was one-half mile from her junior high school. “There doesn’t seem to be an impetus to transition to safer technologies,” said Nye. “We need to push these efforts forward. Change is too slow for communities that are in danger.”