India's Night of Death: Bhopal

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Meanwhile, panic broke out among the 120 workers still in the plant. One employee said he sounded a siren to warn the surrounding community, but few of the surviving residents recall hearing it. Many of the workers reportedly began running for their lives, leaving just one supervisor in the factory to do battle with the fumes. The man, identified later as Shakeel Ahmed, collapsed from the effects of the gas before he could control it. (At week's end his condition was critical.) Nearly an hour after the gas began escaping into the air, the tank was sealed by engineers from another company, Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., sent in by local authorities. By that time, however, all the gas had escaped.

Government investigators hope to determine why none of the workers inside the plant died from the fumes, while outside the plant thousands were killed. The inquiries are also expected to touch on the delicate questions of why the safety systems failed and whether

Union Carbide was negligent in maintaining them. Union Carbide executives firmly deny such allegations. Yet Jackson Browning, the U.S. company's corporate director of health, safety and environmental affairs, conceded that the Indian facility lacked the computerized warning system used at a sister plant in Institute, W. Va. Moreover, according to a former Indian executive of Union Carbide India, the Bhopal plant was furnished with only one manual, back-up alarm system instead of the four-stage alarm system reportedly required in the U.S.

Meanwhile, preliminary investigations by several committees, including one of Indian chemists and other experts, indicated that there had been a number of accidents at the Bhopal plant since it first went into operation in 1977. According to Chief Minister Singh, the Union Carbide facility had endured six accidents in six years before the recent tragedy. In all, he said, one worker had been killed, 47 injured and $620,000 worth of property destroyed.

Union Carbide was first incorporated in India 50 years ago, when it began manufacturing batteries in Calcutta. The Indian subsidiary was allowed to stay on after independence from Britain and is one of the few firms in India in which the parent company is permitted to hold a majority interest, in this case 50.9%. Union Carbide has long enjoyed the favor of an Indian government eager to encourage sophisticated industry and develop the "Green Revolution" in agriculture, of which pesticides are an important ingredient. When the company built a small pesticide plant outside Bhopal in 1969, the project was approved by local authorities with the blessing of the national government. The firm was even exempted from a number of local taxes and provided with water and electricity at concessional prices.

When the small installation was set up, the plant was just outside the city limits; by the time an expansion program got under way six years later, squatters had begun to settle in the once deserted area, many of them attracted by the roads and water lines that accompanied the plant. In 1975, M.N. Buch, administrator of the municipal corporation, asked that the plant be removed. Instead, Buch was promptly removed by government authorities, and the plant remained.