Bhopal: The Worst Industrial Accident in History

today's video is brought to you by Squarespace the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online more on them in a bit the daily lives of almost everyone living on Earth today are touched by items produced in chemical plants at factories around the world in 20th century these factories were seen as technological triumphs the perfect merger of the Industrial Revolution with modern science and yet there's also an unexpectedly high level of danger involved in these chemical processes the finished products may be mostly safe but the compounds used to create them rank among the deadliest ever devised by man society trusts the operators of these plants to perform their work safely without risking the safety of the public in December 1984 that trust was broken in a big way in the central Indian city of Bhopal residents woke up choking and coughing their neighbors fleeing for their lives pursued by a cloud of poisonous gas accidentally released from a factory nearby the disaster was one of the worst in modern history tens of thousands died many thousands more were permanently disabled or partially disabled the Carnage shocked the world even more so by the fact that the culprit wasn't some shady local operator but an American industrial giant one of the largest and most respected companies on Earth the story of Bhopal is a human tragedy caused by negligence led by people knowledgeable enough to know better overseeing undertrained people who weren't it is also a cautionary tale of what happens when companies lose sight of their responsibility for safety in pursuit of profit foreign in the early 1980s India was poised to take its place on the world stage as a rising economic power the country seemed to have finally overcome internal turmoil and Military conflict with neighboring Pakistan that had lasted for decades since its independence in 1947. it was beginning to open its doors as an attractive landing spot for foreign business especially in the manufacturing industry no City better epitomized India's Rising Star than Bhopal located in almost the geographic center of the country Bhopal had been the capital of a princely state dating back to the 1700s the second largest ruled by Muslim nawabs after Hyderabad after Independence Bhopal was designated the capital of the state of madhya Pradesh are one of the largest and most populous in India Bhopal has long been considered a beautiful city to visit with enough Mogul and Middle Eastern style architecture to earn it the nickname the Baghdad of India pilgrims would come from all over the Islamic world to visit the Taj all masaiid one of the largest mosques on Earth while Hindus believe that nearby namada River was sacred the river itself worshiped as the daughter of Shiva it was also a city that was growing rapidly in size the population exploding from a hundred thousand in 1950 to 650 000 in 1980 primarily driven by increased numbers of peasants moving to the city to find work after multiple years of crop failures India's Green Revolution had done much to increase crop yields and Stave off the famines that were all too frequent in the country but they still run into problems primarily the hordes of insects that could devastate entire fields in a matter of days what India needed was factories that could produce tons of pesticides to use in their agricultural industry and that's where Union Carbide came in do you dream of running your own online business maybe working from a tropical beach becoming a digital Nomad then you need Squarespace the only one platform for building your brand and growing your business online stand out with a beautiful website engage with your audience and sell anything you want from your products to your content and even your time and the best part is you don't have to be a tag genius to use it Squarespace has powerful tools and templates that make it easy to create a professional looking website that works for you but Squarespace is more than just a pretty face it's packed with features that can help you grow your business and monetize your content like member areas email campaigns collecting donations analytics blogging tools connect social media accounts and much more and with those Squarespace member areas maybe you can unlock a new Revenue stream for your business and sell access to gated content like online courses or a special newsletter further Squarespace analytics allow you to get insights into who's visiting your site and how they're interacting with your content but look don't just take my word for it join the millions of people who have already started their Squarespace journey and start building your dream website today head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com Geographics to save 10 of your first purchase of a website or a domain for now to today's video [Music] foreign Union Carbide has faded into history today but there was a time when it was one of the most recognizable corporations in the world formed from a merger of four companies in 1917 Union Carbide grew into the world's third largest Chemical Company with annual revenues in the hundreds of millions during the 1970s they made everything ever ready and Energizer batteries pressed Stone anti-freeze glad brand trash bag synthetic rubber for tires and any number of other Plastics and chemical products for use in other Industries offer public consumption they've made rocket fuel for NASA as well as 60 of the world's supply of synthetic breast implants in the 1950s carbide scientists developed a new pesticide called seven that they claimed was effective at shielding crops from the threat of insects while being much better for the environment and less likely to cause health problems in humans and animals than the leading brands at the time that used DDT which would eventually be banned in the United States after great success selling servant bombers in North and South America carlby decided to bring their revolutionary new pesticide to India an emerging market for agricultural products in the wake of the Green Revolution the company proposed to build a factory in India that would be capable of producing 5 000 tons of seven a year would be operated by its Indian subsidiary Union Carbide India limited ucil which was already profitable thanks to a near Monopoly it had on producing batteries in a country that desperately needed them since many homes didn't have electricity they settled on Bhopal as the place to build citing its central location and its large Workforce much to the Delight of the municipal government who promised residents that carbide would be the first of many industrial plants to come to the city bringing jobs and prosperity the production of seven required the use of several dangerous chemicals including phosgene which was used during the first world war as a poison gas but the most terrifying was methyl isocyanate or mic mic is one of the deadliest substances known to man a few drops inhaled into the lungs is enough to kill a person one of its byproducts is the same poison that was used in gas Chambers as capital punishment therefore it was vitally important to make sure that the new Factory was designed in a way that would prevent mic from ever accidentally being released the factory that opened in Bhopal in 1980 had three primary Safety Systems in place to guard against mic leaks the first was a refrigeration unit surrounding the storage tanks that would keep the chemicals at zero degrees Celsius below the boiling point that I would turn it from liquid to gas in case of any accidental leakage two more safety systems were supposed to contain the deadly mic before it escaped the Maze of pipes inside the factory the first of these always the vent gas scrubber which worked by forcing the gas through a bed of caustic soda which would neutralize it the second was a flare Tower similar to those found in all refineries which would burn off the escaping gas thus the American Engineers that designed and built the plant were assured that all was well or when they left it in the hands of their Indian counterparts if they had made an error it was in not sufficiently explaining to the plant operators the serious dangers involved in handling these chemicals leading to a sense of complacency within the factory that more than anything else would contribute to the catastrophe that followed Sunday December the 2nd 1984 was a typical day in Bhopal it was the middle of the festival season as Diwali the Hindu festival of lights had recently finished while Muslims prepared to celebrate Mall the birth of the Prophet Muhammad on December the 5th at the Taj all massive workers were busy preparing for the start of Latina the annual Gathering of the members of the tabliki jamaat or Society of preachers a three-day conference of religious debate and prayer that Drew tens of thousands of Muslims from all over India at the Union Carbide Factory to the north of the city center not much was happening it had become clear soon after it opened that the company had greatly overestimated the amount of seven it could sell to Indian farmers and making matters worse were the two years of delays to the annual Monsoon which killed crops and thus caused Farmers to stop buying pesticide in 1984 carbide had only been able to sell a thousand tons of seven only twenty percent of what the factory could produce in October with the plant losing millions of dollars the company decided to cut its losses shutting down production and making plans to move the equipment to a new Factory in Brazil the factory was now manned by a skeleton crew whose job it was to watch over the storage tanks containing the deadly chemicals that nobody was sure what to do with at this point this included over 60 tons of mic which was spread out between three massive storage tanks located in a concrete bunker within the plant around midnight the night shift at the factory started noticing things were going wrong with storage tank e610 the pressure a reading suddenly jumped off the scale and they could hear hissing and rumbling coming from the bunker The Operators rushed out in time to witness the concrete crack and fall apart revealing the 12 meter long tank which was hopping around like a Mexican jumping beam then with a bang an emergency relief valve blew it seal venting the contents into the pipes that connected the tank with the plant none of the safety systems work to prevent the gas from blowing out into the atmosphere as a last-ditch effort to avert catastrophe The Operators attempted to spray fire hoses at the escaping gas hoping to force it to drop to the ground but the water pressure in the hoses wasn't strong enough for the Jets of water to reach the top of the tower that the gas was blowing out of in fact they could do nothing to prevent the entire contents of e610 42 tons of one of the most toxic gases on the planet from being vented into the sky above burple the mic was propelled by the wind south from the plant towards the city the first to be affected were the residents of the neighborhoods occupied by some of the city's poorest residents located close to the carbide Factory people began to wake up coughing their eyes burning unable to catch their breath Panic spread through the neighborhood and people began running for their lives pursued by this Invisible Killer those who ran actually inhaled more of the gas than those who didn't and many dropped to the ground after only a few steps many others never made it out of their beds choking to death in their sleep many were convinced that it was the apocalypse or that anatomic bomb had been set off the gas cloud continued moving across the Southeastern section of Bhopal sweeping over more neighborhoods as well as the train station where it caught hundreds of Travelers the only warning anyone had that the gas was coming was the smell mic gives off an odor described as similar to that of boiled cabbage Deputy station Master V K Sharma nearly died when he waded out into the Carnage without a gas mask on to tell the engineer of an arriving Express train to leave an act that is believed to have saved hundreds of lives Chalmer was lying on an autopsy table when the coroner suddenly realized they were still alive it was one of hundreds of such stories at burpa's a media Hospital which was quickly overwhelmed by thousands of gas victims seeking help a triage area was set up outside the hospital using tents but there was little they could do no one there had ever heard of mic or how to treat it most of the victims died a horrible death one of the symptoms of MIT poisoning is pulmonary edema meaning the lungs pull up with fluid and the person drowns unable to get any air every organ in their body was affected including the brain which suffered cerebral edema one pathologist described gas victim's blood as having the consistency of current jelly the gas didn't just kill the people who inhaled it it was also absorbed into their clothes and on their skin sickening and even killing medical personnel who were trying to help them by the time the gas cow dissipated a few hours later the East End of Bhopal was a disaster Zone bodies lay everywhere not just people but animals including dogs cats horses cows and chickens there were so many casualties that it proved impossible to get an exact count more than half a million people were exposed to mic that night over 75 percent of the City's population estimates of the number of dead that first night range from three thousand to seven thousand and it would continue to rise experts believe that between sixteen thousand and thirty thousand lives were lost as a result of the disaster the worst industrial accident in history the very Act of taking care of the Dead proved to be a logistical challenge Muslim tradition calls for bodies to be buried in the ground as soon as possible but there were so many victims that the city's Muslim cemeteries quickly ran out of space burple's Grand Mafia issued a fatwa that permitted the opening of old Graves to bury the victims of the disaster bodies were stacked ten deep in each grave meanwhile the Hindu victims needed to be burned which required tons of firewood and miles and miles of cloth to make the funeral shrouds while making preparations to light one heart workers realized that one of the bodies was not dead at all but still breathing the young woman who had just been married the night of the tragedy would eventually recover and be reunited with a new husband many of the Dead had no one to mourn for them entire families had been wiped out with no one left to claim them worldwide shock at the scale of the tragedy quickly gave way to anger how had this been allowed to happen scientists representing both the Indian government and Union Carbide arrived in Bhopal and launched separate investigations into the disaster according to former workers at the seven Factory things began to go wrong in 1982 when it became clear the company was losing money in an effort to cut costs 35 percent of the plant's Workforce was laid off with another 15 percent transferred into a general pool of workers to fill gaps as needed turnover at the plants among the remaining workers increased until practically every one of the workers who'd been trained to operate the factory safely were gone replaced by lower paid workers who didn't really understand the equipment they were operating this included the new plant director as the American who'd been running it since it was opened was sent home and replaced by an Indian local who'd been transferred from from ucil's Battery division he never seemed to grasp that running a pesticide Factory containing highly leaked or chemicals was a bit different from running a battery Factory training the new workers was difficult because all the instruction manuals were printed in English a language most of them didn't speak and the pressure to cut costs continued This Time by deferring maintenance not fixing things when they broke this resulted in most of the gauges in the plant being non-functional or out of calibration and the ones that did work were unreliable most unforgivably all of the Safety Systems designed to prevent a leak like the one that had occurred had been disabled the air conditioning system had been deliberately Switched Off and its Freon Supply drained out in order to save money both the vent gas scrubber and the flare Tower weren't working maintenance that would have put them back online having been put off until later again as a cost-saving measure none of this on its own explained the leak however the only thing that could cause the tank to rupture the way it did oh is something called a runaway exothermic reaction when mic comes into contact with water especially if it contains metal impurities like rust a chemical reaction takes place that heats up the mic eventually boiling it into gas as more and more gas is created the pressure inside the tank increases and as soon as it finds a weak spot in this case the emergency relief valve it breaks through and escapes but how could water have been introduced into the storage tank an examination of Maintenance records reveals the likely cause about four hours before the gas leak routine cleaning operation was conducted on the pipework leading from the mic production facility to the storage tanks because mic is so corrosive water needed to be regularly run through the pipes to keep them clean on this night the worker in charge of the operation noticed that water wasn't coming out of the outflow nozzles the way it was supposed to the filters were blocked by debris after cleaning the filters the water began flowing out of some of the nozzles but not all of them assured by a supervisor that the clock would eventually clear its healthy a went off shift leaving the water running through the system what none of them realized was that the water wasn't simply backing up in the pipes as it was supposed to it was flowing somewhere else following the path of least resistance crucially the pipes being cleaned had not been isolated with slip blind plates a metal disc inserted at the coupling of two sections of pipe to prevent the water from going where it isn't supposed to In This Way hundreds of liters of water were believed to have backflowed into the storage tank the contents of the tank were supposed to be kept Under Pressure the empty space filled with nitrogen to prevent this from happening but there was no nitrogen in the tank that night those pipes like most of the other equipment at the factory weren't functioning correctly all signs pointed to a truly shocking amount of negligence at the factory this might make sense if it was a local Small Time producer but this was Union Carbide this was one of the largest chemical companies on earth a company that prided itself on its safety culture it wasn't like there weren't warning signs leaks had become commonplace at the factory leading up to the disaster including one incident where a worker died after being exposed to fostering its own Auditors twice inspected the factory and twice reported back severe deficiencies in both the equipment and the way the plant was being run but nothing was done to correct these errors probably because Executives thought it was a waste of money to maintain a factory they were planning to shut down anyway Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson who had flown to India in the days after the disaster to see the situation for himself was detained by local police and placed under house arrest under pressure from the central government however he was released after posting a two thousand dollar bail and was quietly encouraged to leave the country it seemed that high-ranking officials within India were very concerned that holding Anderson would provoke the big business in interests they wanted to encourage to come to the country and build factories either that or someone had been bribed not uncommon occurrence in India at the time Union Carbide who would come up with their own theory of the causes of the disaster one that absolved them of any blame for it they insisted that a factory employee had sabotaged the tank deliberately pumping water into it and causing the runaway reaction that caused the leak the theory did not explain why all of the Safety Systems weren't working nor did you explain why the company had allowed 60 tons of an extremely dangerous chemical to sit in storage at a factory that wasn't currently producing any pesticide in any case no carbide employees were ever held criminally responsible for the disaster at bopal Warren Anderson died in 2014 having never returned to India to face charges the US government had blocked all attempts to extradite him after years of litigation the company agreed to pay out 470 million dollars in compensation to the victims of the gas leak while the number sounds substantial it actually wasn't when you consider the sheer number of victims most of them only received about two thousand dollars in compensation and almost insulting you consider the suffering that many of them went through some small consolation can be had by the victims though in the Bhopal would prove to be the ruin of Union Carbide in the week after the disaster the company normally one of the safest Investments on Wall Street lost 15 percent of its stock value it was worth 600 million dollars less practically overnight and it would never really recover it was bought out by Dow Chemical in 2001 which continues to insist to this day that the real cause of the disaster was sabotage which is believed by many to be nothing more than a cynical attempt to avoid any further liability [Music] it's been almost 40 years since the disaster and Bhopal still carries the scars of the hundreds of thousands who didn't die immediately after being exposed to the gas many suffered debilitating injuries the most common are damage to the eyes and the lungs with many patients ending up partially blind or completely blind and oh with breathing trouble other health problems attributed to the poison include nerve damage problems with cognitive function increased livelihood of developing cancer and psychological conditions such as PTSD women who were exposed to the gas suffered early onset menopause and were more likely to suffer miscarriages and other health problems while pregnant children born to gas affected parents are more likely to develop birth defects the factory itself was abandoned by Union Carbide after the disaster it still remains there today a rusting Hulk that no one's really sure what to do with and what's worse toxic chemicals have continually leaked from the plant since it opened contaminating the groundwater and soil with heavy metals like Mercury and other poisons these have caused more severe health problems in those exposed used to the contaminants and nothing has been done to clean it up because none of the parties involved Union Carbide it's Indian affiliate the authorities of Maria Pradesh and the central government will claim responsibility everyone points the finger at somebody else claiming that they should pay for it not them all the while the contamination continues to spread with bad water being found up to five kilometers from the plant the Bhopal disaster soon vanished from the front page replaced by tragedies like the year of the plane crash in 1985 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 but for those who survived it the residents of Bhopal it has been something they've had to live with ever since many of the victims still struggle with serious medical issues resulting from the disaster with from the government difficult most facts turned charitable organizations like the Sam having a trust for help or they simply suffer in silence not until the last survivors are gone will the scars of Beau Paul fade and as long as the toxic waste continues to poison people without being cleaned up there's no telling when that will be but Paul is a reminder of what happens when corporate greed is allowed to triumph over safety of what happens when people who don't understand the scientific forces under their control are put in a position to make mistakes by people intelligent enough to know better

Channel: Geographics

Views: 315,136

Keywords: world's worst industrial disaster, bhopal accident, worst accidents, bhopal incident, accident documentary, bhopal anniversary, bhopal gas tragedy, chemical plant incident, bhopal 35 jears old, disaster documentary, bhopal explosion, chemical plant explosion, bhopal india, bhopal gas disaster, bhopal disaster, bhopal gas disaster 1984, chemical plant, bhopal gas, documentary, plainly difficult disaster

Id: v-DnFRlqq30

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023