Nineteen years ago this month, families in Bhopal were awakened in the middle of the night by terrible burning in their eyes and lungs. Within minutes, children and mothers and fathers staggered into the street, gasping for air and blinded by the chemicals that seared their eyes. As they ran in complete terror, someone yelled that the Union Carbide pesticides factory had exploded, spewing out poisonous gas throughout the city.
Soon thousands of people lay dead in the city’s main roads, with every truck, taxi and ox cart weighted down with injured and terrified refugees. No one in the emergency room at the city hospital knew what the toxic gases were or how to treat the thousands of patients that flooded into the hallways and filled the front door. By the morning, more than 5,000 people were dead, while a half million more were injured.
Bhopal has rightly been called the Hiroshima of the Chemical Industry. It is the stark story of the human fall-out from extraordinary corporate negligence.
The day after the disaster, Union Carbide’s CEO Warren Anderson flew to India to assess the damage his company had visited upon its Indian neighbors. He was promptly met at the airport and arrested. After a few days he was released and allowed to return to the United States. Anderson has not returned to India since, even though there’s an outstanding warrant for his arrest and a pending criminal homicide case against him and other Carbide officials in the Bhopal courts. The Indian government has even issued extradition orders for Anderson, but the U.S. government has so far ignored the extradition request.
Even as Anderson lives a comfortable retirement in the New York suburbs, the catastrophe continues in slow motion. More than 50,000 people in Bhopal are disabled due to their injuries, and thousands more suffer serious continuing health problems. The amount of compensation Union Carbide paid to the survivors has not been enough to cover basic medicines, let alone other costs associated with their inability to work.
The abandoned factory site remains essentially the same as the day that Carbide’s employees ran for their lives. Sacks of unused pesticides lay strewn in ghostly buildings. Toxic waste litters the grounds and continues to leak into the neighborhood well water supply, poisoning generations unborn in 1984.
Officials at Dow Chemical, the new owners of Union Carbide, claim they have nothing to do with the ongoing disaster in Bhopal, neither the pending criminal case, nor the environmental contamination nor the public health fall-out. However, Dow has set aside $2 billion to address Carbide’s asbestos liabilities, another public health legacy of the former chemical giant.
Moreover, as grave as this injustice is for the people of Bhopal, Americans must learn how it points to dangers for us here — dangers from the continuing failure of the chemical industry and U.S. government to address the security and public health threats posed by deadly chemicals.
The chemical industry has always viewed Bhopal purely as a public relations disaster, not as a wake-up call for real chance. In order to head off further regulation, the chemical manufacturers created a voluntary program called “Responsible Care†with the logo of “Don’t Trust Us, Track Usâ€. In this way, the industry has avoided any serious restrictions on its chemicals since 1984.
During this time, we have continued to learn more about the dark side of the chemical revolution. We now know we all carry the chemical industry’s toxic products in our bodies. Every man, women and child in America has a “body burden†of chemicals that are linked to cancer, birth defects, asthma, learning disabilities and other diseases. We are all guinea pigs in an epic uncontrolled chemical experiment run by Dow, Monsanto, DuPont and other petrochemical companies.
If we woke up one morning and learned that this chemical invasion was the work of foreign terrorists, the federal government would be immediately mobilized to defend our citizens from this chemical warfare threat. But because the perpetrators are some of President Bush’s most generous contributors and ardent collaborators, we are left defenseless as a nation against this chemical security threat.
Recently, it’s become even harder to track the chemical industry, since it has been working with the Bush Administration behind the veil of homeland security to conceal information about the “worst case disaster†for its facilities and the health threat posed by its products. But the picture that is emerging is a frightening one.
According to federal government sources, there are 112 chemical facilities nationwide that could kill at least one million people if they accidentally exploded or were attacked by terrorists. Some of these chemical factories are located in major American cities and put as many as 8 million people’s lives at risk. Yet the chemical industry continues to resist any meaningful regulation that would require them to replace the most dangerous chemicals with safer alternatives. A recent “60 Minutes†expose vividly showed many of these facilities lack even the most basic security protection, yet the government is spending billions of our tax dollars looking for chemical terrorists overseas.
We don’t have to look in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. They are right here, in our neighborhoods, in our food and in our bodies.
On the nineteenth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, survivors in Bhopal are marching, making speeches and demanding their basic rights to be free of chemical poisons, to be compensated for their damages, and to hold the chemical industry responsible for the world’s worst industrial disaster.
Despite their ongoing victimization, people in Bhopal have not given up. Their protests are testimony to the triumph of memory over forgetting and the celebration of the human spirit over the rationalized tyranny of corporate profit margins.
So this month we must recognize that the Bhopal survivors are speaking not just for themselves, but for us as well. In the last two decades, Bhopal has come much closer to home. The chemical terror they experienced and the lack of care and respect they have received is a haunting reminder that we also live under a similar poison cloud.
Gary Cohen is the Executive Director of the Environmental Health Fund in Boston. He serves on the international advisory board of the Sambhavna Trust, which operates a free medical clinic for the survivors in Bhopal. For more information on this issue, visit http://www.bhopal.net
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