The Bhopal Gas Tragedy: The Worst Industrial Accident Of All Time | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by expressvpn there's a town called west texas it's not in west texas it's just north of waco which is kind of more on the east side of texas but it's called west texas this is a real town this is not an evan costello routine it's a small town farming community and one day back in 2013 a guy named derek hurt and his daughter chloe were driving around and she noticed that a building was on fire he recognized it as a local fertilizer plant that made fertilizer for the farmers around there and you know the first responders had already been called there are a dozen or so firefighters out there fighting the blaze and everything so he didn't really have much to do so he got out his phone and decided to record it and what he recorded was this [Music] luckily both of them escaped unharmed but many others weren't so lucky 15 people died most of them first responders and 200 people were injured in a blast that the u.s geological survey measured as a 2.1 magnitude tremor where the plant once stood there is now a 93-foot wide crater the cause of the fire has never been fully understood some people suspected that it might have been deliberately set there's not really been any proof of that but whoever started it however it got started it eventually hit the 240 tons of ammonium nitrate that they had in storage that by the way is what they used in the oklahoma city bombing except they only had a truck full of it the west explosion was insane and one of the biggest warehouse explosions ever on record until last year on august 4th of 2020 a fire broke out in warehouse 12 in the port of beirut this warehouse was holding and you can't make this up folks fireworks and 2 750 tons of ammonium nitrate there you can see the fireworks going off in the smoke cloud and there you can see the ammonium nitrate according to wikipedia this caused 207 deaths 7 500 injuries and caused 15 billion dollars in damage the explosion was equal to a 1.1 kiloton bomb and could be heard as far away as cyprus companies often work with hazardous chemicals and these are just a couple of extreme examples of what can happen when things go wrong with those chemicals but neither of these disasters comes close to what happened in bhopal india in 1984. not only did it kill far more people but unlike these examples it did it without making a sound [Music] to understand what happened in bhopal we had to first establish what was going on in the city at the time bhopal is the capital city of madhya pradesh and its history goes back at least 300 years maybe more than a thousand if the legends of the founding are true interesting thing about bhopal for about a hundred years it was ruled by a dynasty of women called the begums that's a title not a name by the way modern india is a constitutional republic so that party's officially over but the royal heirs basically live like bollywood kardashians they're huge celebrities in india but anyway in the middle of the 20th century bhopal grew into an important industrial hub in india grew from about 100 000 people in 1950 to 2.4 million in 2021 but as it tends to happen the economic growth didn't affect everybody equally when you talk about what happened in bhopal it's as much a story about economic inequality as it is about corporate negligence in 1984 the city was home to around 784 thousand to a million people depending on who you ask seriously the numbers are all over the place but about 20 percent of people there lived in what are called cucha homes these are homes that are kind of made out of whatever scraps they can find to put them together with they're usually temporary in nature shantytowns might be another name for this kind of neighborhood and i use the present tense on that because people are still living like that today back in 84 most of these kuchen neighborhoods were concentrated in the northern industrial part of the city whereas the wealthier people live further south and what are called puka homes which might be traditional homes like you and i might experience or flats or apartments and smack dab in the middle of those kuchen neighborhoods in the industrial north was one of the city's biggest employers it was a chemical plant run by united car by india limited or ucil the plant was an important employment hub in the town over a thousand families made their living off of it not to mention hundreds of businesses around it that sort of fed off of that ecosystem when the plant was built in 1969 the world was going through a bit of a green revolution especially in india and what that means at the time anyway was lots of pesticides pesticides didn't always have the stigma that we applied to them today once upon a time they were a godsend they made it possible for our developing nations to feed their people and get rid of food insecurity so the bhopal ucil plant was was a huge producer of these pesticides that were so important to them at the time and the two brand names that they made specifically were called seven and termic both of these pesticides were produced with a chemical called methyl isocyanate or mic and originally it was produced in a plant in west virginia and shipped over to india but to save costs they decided to start producing it locally at the plant in bhopal so after getting special permission to manufacture poison gas from the city they opened up the new mic production facility in 1979. so to make methyl isocyanate you need a couple of ingredients one is phosgene which was an actual chemical weapon that was used in world war one and the other one is methylamine which if that sounds familiar at all is because you probably heard it in breaking bad because it's used to make crystal meth so you need the phosgene and methyl amine to make methyl isocyanate and you need methyl acidocyanate to make the two pesticides seven and turmeric by the way if you're wondering what exactly these two pesticides were designed to kill the answer is pretty much everything old-school pesticides weren't picky according to the missouri botanical garden seven is toxic to quote a broad range of insects on certain fruits berries nuts ornamental flowers trees shrubs and on lawns it's also toxic to bees aquatic invertebrates and of course humans the other pesticide turmeric is is highly regulated but a spoonful of it can kill a rhino it's also used as a rat poison and uh trigger warning but burglars have been known to use this to kill guard dogs when breaking into houses yikes now it should be said there's nothing inherently evil about these pesticides chances are you've eaten something that was grown with their help but they are powerful chemicals that require special handling or else things can go wrong and within a couple of years of producing their own mic and bhopal things started to go wrong on christmas day in 1981 a phosgene leak killed one worker and sent another one to the hospital less than a month later a second leak sent 25 people to the hospital clearly there was something wrong with this plant part of the problem was just simple budget cuts union carbide had a couple of other plants that made mic one was the one in west virginia another one was in france and both of these had computer systems that were designed to stop leaks the one in bhopal was supposed to be a copy of the one from west virginia but it had eight million dollars from its budget so they couldn't afford the computerization this means that operators had to detect and respond to problems manually and there were only eight shutdown devices when 24 were the standard now that said some analysts have suggested that this was actually adequate to keep the plant from running into a problem except maybe one in every million years or something like that if things were done correctly as we are about to find out that was not the case there were three underground tanks restoring the plants mic each with a 60 ton capacity two of the tanks were for top quality mic the third tank held runoff for waste product and the operating instructions said that no more than half of each tank was to be filled and all three tanks had refrigeration units to keep them cool they all had safety valves to prevent explosions now could they have had more redundancy in this system yes they could have but again some analysts say that that was sufficient for the time so what happened at bhopal is very complicated corporate greed obviously plays a big hand in it race plays an issue i'll let the commenters go to town on that one but in the early 80s india went into a famine cross began to fail farmers ran out of business and the need for pesticide went down so ucil and the parent company union carbide they did what companies do they slashed costs they they cut corners they got rid of production and staff many of the more skilled workers went off to find new jobs elsewhere and basically the plant was being maintained by a skeleton crew the problems began to pile up but they didn't go unnoticed in fact union carbide sent some of their own inspectors after the 25 people went to the hospital after that leak and they found 61 safety violations 61 safety violations that constituted in their words a risk for a serious incident to occur union carbide claimed to have an action plan in place but this was not enough for indian journalist rajkumar kazuani he become an outspoken critic of ucil and wrote a series of scathing articles claiming corruption and incompetence at the plant and warning of an impending disaster referring to the open kucha houses that surrounded the plant he described bhopal as quote a city on the edge of a volcano his passion for the story stemmed from the fact that the person that was killed in 1981 was a personal friend of his unfortunately his passion for this went unheeded and the plant continued to cut costs and and fall behind on maintenance issues for example a refrigeration unit was deactivated in june 1984. in october the scrubber was taken offline the scrubber is basically a gas vent that was supposed to spray a neutralizing agent while the plant was operating now for the record neither the refrigeration unit nor the scrubber by themselves would have caused this accident to take place in fact there was a third fail-safe was called a flare tower that would actually burn off any chemicals that might have leaked at least there was one until november of 1984 when that got taken offline supposedly to be repaired and that repair kept getting delayed so let's review you have a city with a massive population of low-income people living in shanty towns around a chemical plant that's producing an actual chemical weapon with 61 safety violations on their record two deadly accidents that have already occurred and three fail-safes that have now been taken offline never before has the stage been more set for a massive disaster to occur and on december 2nd of 1984 that disaster finally struck sometime between eight and nine pm on the night of december 2nd an order was given to flush the pipes that lead phosgene into the mic tanks and unbeknownst to the crew that night a safety valve that prevented this water from spilling into the tank had been uninstalled which allowed water to flow into the nyc tank the name of this particular tank was tank number 610 and at the time it had 42 tons of mic in it now you might remember that this was a 60 ton tank and it was only supposed to be about half full so it had 12 tons of extra mic in it than it was supposed to have and now water is flowing into it water that undergoes an exothermic reaction when it comes into contact with mic so now the pressure and temperature in this tank is rising at 11 pm the pressure in tank 610 is now 10 psi just 30 minutes before it had been 2 psi around 11 30 workers report that they can smell a leak around the tank plus they can see yellowish water coming out of a branch of the relief pipe so to neutralize the leak they activate a water carton that sprays around the tank and then they go on a tea break yeah that sounds bad but in fairness some have reported that they were actually kind of reconvening to sort of discuss what to do next and while they were discussing over this tea the pressure in the tank continued to rise by midnight it was at 55 psi now at some point the temperature in the tank exceeded 300 degrees celsius because the concrete around one of the tanks began to crack and buckle i say at some point because the temperature indicator on this tank had been offline and had been for a long time the only reason that we know that it reached that kind of temperature was because of the effects that it had on the concrete okay so now things are starting to get serious a safety valve is popped and workers report hearing rumblings in the tank operators try to activate the scrubber but it fails we don't know exactly why but it's thought that maybe the neutralizing agent had run out next they tried to raise a water curtain but the sprayers only went up 10 meters whereas the vent hood that they needed to reach was 30 meters high they tried to activate the refrigeration unit but apparently the freon had run out of that like this this sounds like a massive comedy of errors like i imagine these guys running around and like in double speed like a benny hill sketch with just one thing going wrong after another but there's absolutely nothing funny about what happened next by 1am gas could be smelled in the slums around the plant now about 30 minutes prior the supervisor had run the alarm so some people had already fled the scene but he only ran the alarm for a few minutes nobody really knows why he stopped it maybe he thought that they had gotten a handle on the situation but they had not those who slept through the alarm and i'm sure i would have been in this group only were woken up because their eyes were burning and they had searing pains in their chest and a pervasive cough that only went away after their throats closed up causing them to suffocate to death in their beds as the gas silently permeated their open homes by 1 15 the police arrive on the scene to find the area in total chaos people running around uncontrollably coughing choking to death on hands and knees and streets that are already littered with bodies one of the first on the scene is police superintendent swaraz puri who suffered some burns to his eyes he went to a nearby hospital and got treated and then came back to conduct crowd control sometime between 2 and 2 30 a.m workers were finally able to reseed a safety valve and get the leak to stop but at this point 40 to 45 000 kilograms of mic were floating in a cloud over the slums of bhopal apparently the workers realized how much had escaped so they turned on the alarm for good this time and by three o'clock army engineers arrived trucking people to the hospital hundreds at a time by the time the sun came up 12 000 people were being treated at nearby immediate hospital and by the next morning it was 55 000 people for perspective media hospital had 1200 beds over the next few days some 170 000 people were being treated in hospitals around bhopal and they weren't all just from the slums the winds carried the mic cloud from the north down to the south eventually covering 20 square kilometers of bhopal granted the poorest sections of paul suffered the most by far but it eventually affected all walks of life the sheer number of victims in this tragedy it reaches a point to where the numbers don't even mean anything anymore you know our brains can't even rationalize it as the saying goes when death is a tragedy a thousand is a statistic but these were real people and each one of these deaths was an individual tragedy and it left behind loved ones whose lives would never be the same also much like our covet experience healthcare workers bore the burn of the disaster when they came into contact with the poison on the skin and clothes of their patients one nurse described the feeling of mic exposure as quote it felt like somebody had filled up our bodies with red chilies like all massive disasters the exact death toll is kind of hard to calculate union carbide estimated that 3 800 people had died in the first few hours of exposure and by the way that doesn't include the countless number of animals in livestock in fact the area around the plant became a sudden wasteland as even trees and grass began to die now a different estimate suggests that 8 000 people died in the first week and that's based off the fact that 7 000 funeral shrouds were bought in bhopal in the week following the accident and at least a thousand bodies were unclaimed but workers who disposed of the body say that that number is way too low one particular truck driver said that he would haul 120 bodies at a time five times a day to a disposal area and there were eight truckers doing the same thing and this went on for three to four days so a little bit of math puts that number at around fourteen thousand many of them buried in mass graves five to six people at a time some of them just thrown onto log pyres these numbers are staggering but for every person that died there's a dozen or so people that suffered from exposure and had long-term effects from it these effects include ocular respiratory reproductive genetic and neurobehavioral issues a high infant mortality rates reported among the women of bhopal and many children have been born with severe physical and mental impairments cancer and thyroid problems occur at elevated rates and the problem isn't just the gas leak mercury lead nickel chromium and several organic toxins have been sampled in the ground water nearby due to faulty storage of the plant according to a 2019 study pollutants are continuing to contaminate and get into the groundwater and move up the food chain there are reportedly areas around this plant that to this day are still so contaminated that you'll lose consciousness after 10 minutes of standing there between the initial exposure and the long-term effects it's estimated that over half a million people have been affected by the tragedy at bhopal and 75 of the people who died of covid 19 in the last year in bhopal were former gas survivors one of whom was a journalist i mentioned previously rashkimar kaswani he was caught in the death cloud he tried to warn everybody about and he survived and went on to have a distinguished career he's considered something of a legend in indian journalism but he died of kobit 19 on may 21st of this year in the aftermath of the bhopal gas tragedy the union carbide company tried to claim that there was some kind of sabotage on the plant but this was thoroughly investigated and dismissed kind of hard to claim sabotage when you have like 20 safety measures disconnected guys there's also a lot of passing the bucket union carbide claiming that it was all the fault of ucil even though they own a majority stake in the company this is kind of amazing though the ceo of union carbide warren anderson he visited bhopal four days after the accident and his reception was beautiful he was placed under house arrest they arrested his ass a ceo experiencing consequences for his actions he posted bail in a matter of hours and then quickly escaped the country and by the way the person who drove him to the airport was that police superintendent swarajpuri i mentioned earlier after fleeing the country he was considered a fugitive from justice by the indian government he was they attempted many extradition requests needless to say he never returned to india he retired from ucc in 1986 and never suffered any legal consequences for what happened before he died in 2014 though he did say that he had a guilty conscience about it he had many sleepless nights and said that he didn't feel comfortable smiling or laughing in public because he thought that people might think it was inappropriate it almost makes you feel bad for the guy i'm kidding [ __ ] you dude the effort to hold somebody accountable for the bhopal gas tragedy continues to this very day in 2010 eight people were convicted of death by negligence including the former plant manager each of them were given a two-year sentence and were forced to pay a small fine but they got out on bail the union carbide corporation was ordered to pay 470 million dollars to victims in 1989 but after all the people had filed their claims it came out to like 800 per person the bhopal factory closed in 1986 and union carbide was bought out by dow chemical in 2001 and since that happened of course del chemical has claimed no responsibility victims groups remain active in bhopal today still seeking justice 35 years later though most of the direct exposure victims are now gone still hundreds of thousands of people are feeling the effects of the worst industrial accident of all time industrial accidents still occur today of course but one of the bigger problems that they had to deal with is computer hacking you might remember the the colonial pipeline got shut down by a ransomware attack just a few weeks ago and while you may not be dealing with chemicals or explosives you may fall victim to this yourself so to protect yourself i might recommend you check out today's sponsor expressvpn expressvpn hides your computer from the outside world by making you look like you're somewhere else by connecting you to a virtual private network it's fast it's super easy to install i was able to do it with no problems at all so if you have any competency whatsoever it'll be a breeze and it just it just works it's just totally in the background you just turn it on and keep doing your thing like normal in fact now the world's opening up again you might start seeing yourself doing some work in coffee shops and restaurants and stuff like that this is a good reason to have it because those are very open wi-fi networks you don't want to leave yourself 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 777,518

Rating: 4.9271097 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: pwNrLtU2x2w

Length: 21min 48sec (1308 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/rubiblu]

Thought this belongs here. A reminder of how CEO's often escape legal responsibility for their actions, and the ridiculous notions that the higher ups care about anything other than profits.

[u/notallthatrelevant]

Union Carbide/Occidental Chem/Monsanto/Bayer agriscience/whatever the fuck they're called this year is a fucking evil company.