India's Night of Death: Bhopal

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With national elections approaching, officials may have been playing for publicity with Anderson's arrest. The gesture may also have been intended to dramatize a growing demand among Indian politicians for Union Carbide to pay the same sort of compensation to Bhopal's victims that it would if they were Americans. Those U.S. rates, under which each claimant could typically win $100,000, are considerably higher than their Indian equivalents. At week's end, three American attorneys, including Melvin Belli, filed a lawsuit in Charleston, W. Va., on behalf of Bhopal victims, asking damages of $15 billion. Said a company spokesman in Danbury: "Something like this happens, and people everywhere begin seeing dollar signs in front of their eyes."

As Indian officials began their investigations, details started to emerge about what went wrong at the plant. Methyl isocyanate, a colorless chemical compound that behaves in humans and animals like a potent form of tear gas (see box), is used by Union Carbide as an ingredient in producing relatively toxic pesticides known as Sevin and Temik. At the Bhopal facility it was stored in three double-walled, stainless steel tanks, buried mostly underground to limit leakage in the event of an accident and to help shield them from air temperatures that could soar to 120° F in summer. Refrigerated to keep the highly volatile gas in its liquid form, the tanks were also equipped with thermostats, valves and other devices to warn when the temperature of the chemical exceeded 100° F, the point at which the liquid turns into a gas. Should the temperature rise further, the gas would expand, increasing pressure on the inside of the tank. Should the pressure build, a relief valve would vent the gas in order to prevent a rupture of the tank.

The Bhopal plant had two safety devices that would operate automatically in case a tank ruptured. The first was a scrubber that would neutralize the highly reactive gas by treating it with caustic soda. If the scrubber failed to do the job, another mechanism would ignite the gas and burn it off in the air harmlessly before it could do much damage.

Whether through human error or mechanical failure, neither of those safety measures worked last week. The plant had been temporarily closed for maintenance two weeks before the accident, and both the methyl isocyanate storage tanks and the pipes connecting them were under repair. According to Madanlal Ranji, president of the plant's labor union, the scrubber was also in the process of being fixed. To make matters worse, a critical panel in the control room had been removed, perhaps as part of the maintenance program, thus preventing the leak from showing up on monitors.

Almost two hours before the gas escaped, a workman noticed that the temperature in the tanks was well above 100° F and rising steadily. As a result, pressure in the tanks was mounting. The worker tried to manually operate the mechanisms that were supposed to relieve the pressure, but it had already gone too high. He alerted his supervisor, and four colleagues donned gas masks and hurried to the scene. They too were unable to seal the tank; by then, all systems had failed.