India's Night of Death

By Pico Iyer

The first sign that something was wrong came at 11 p.m. A worker at the Union Carbide pesticide plant on the outskirts of Bhopal (pop. 672,000), an industrial city 466 miles south of New Delhi, noticed that pressure was building up in a tank containing 45 tons of methyl isocyanate, a deadly chemical used to make pesticides. At 56 minutes past midnight, the substance began escaping into the air from a faulty valve. For almost an hour, the gas formed a vast, dense fog of death that drifted toward Bhopal.

The vapor passed first over the shantytowns of Jaiprakash and Chhola, just outside the walls of the plant, leaving hundreds dead as they slept. The gas quickly enveloped the city's railway station, where beggars were huddled against the chill. In minutes, a score had died and 200 others were gravely ill. Through temples and shops, over streets and lakes, across a 25-sq.-mi. quadrant of the city, the cloud continued to spread, noiselessly and lethally. The night air was fairly cool (about 60DEG F), the wind was almost calm, and a heavy mist clung to the earth; those conditions prevented the gas from dissipating, as it would have done during the day.

A few hundred yards from the chemical plant, M.A. Khan, a farmer, was lying in bed when he heard several thumps at a nearby dairy farm and sensed that his own cows were milling about restlessly. He arose and went outside. Two cows were dead on the ground. A third gave out a loud groan and collapsed as Khan watched. Then the farmer's eyes began to smart painfully. He ran into the darkness. The day after, at Bhopal's Hamidia Hospital, his eyes shut tightly and tears streaming down his cheeks, Khan described his fear: "I thought it was a plague."

Others thought it was a nuclear bomb or an earthquake or the end of the world. As word of the cloud of poison began to spread, hundreds, then thousands, took to the road in flight from the fumes. In cars and rickshaws, on foot and bicycles, residents moved as fast as they could. As in some eerie science-fiction nightmare, hundreds of people blinded by the gas groped vainly toward uncontaminated air or stumbled into one another in the darkness. Others simply collapsed by the side of the road in the crush. At least 37 people who had inhaled the fumes died hours later from the effects, having reached what they thought was safety.

By week's end more than 2,500 people were dead in the worst industrial disaster the world has known. At least 1,000 more were expected to die from the fumes in the next two weeks; some 3,000 remained critically ill. In all, 150,000 people were treated at hospitals and clinics in Bhopal and surrounding communities. Most of the dead had succumbed because their lungs had filled with fluid, causing the equivalent of death by drowning. Others had suffered heart attacks. The disaster struck hardest at children and old people, whose lungs were either too small or too weak to withstand the poison. A number of the survivors were permanently blinded, others suffered serious lesions in their nasal and bronchial passages. Doctors also noticed concussions, paralysis and signs of epilepsy, suggesting, they said, the presence of some other chemical-perhaps phosgene, which is used to make methyl isocyanate. Six days after the accident, patients were still arriving at Hamidia Hospital at the rate of one a minute, many of them doubled over with racking coughs, gasping for breath or convulsed with violent spasms that brought a red froth to the lips.

Within hours of the leak, hundreds of victims had lined up at Hamidia Hospital and makeshift clinics, where doctors and nurses worked frantically to ease their misery. As the hospitals filled, patients gathered in the corridors or on the grounds outside; side by side, babies and children thrashed around, unable to breathe. Thousands of animals were also killed by the gas. As the days passed, a sickly stench of decay arose from the bloated carcasses of water buffalo, cattle and dogs that clogged the city's streets. Finally, the army removed them with cranes. But as long as animal and human corpses decomposed in the open air, the threat of contamination increased, and with it the specter of cholera. Meanwhile, rats scurried around the dead bodies, awakening fears of bubonic plague. For days, vultures and wild-eyed pariah dogs roamed through the piles of rotting flesh, feasting.

Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded his mother Indira as Prime Minister after her assassination in October, broke off his campaigning for the Dec. 24 national elections to visit Bhopal. Expressing his shock and sorrow, Gandhi announced a $4 million relief fund. In addition, Arjun Singh, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh state, of which Bhopal is the capital, promised compensation of about $500 for every family that had suffered a death and $100 for every family that had a member hospitalized. President Reagan sent Gandhi a note expressing the grief shared by him and the American people.

The disaster in Bhopal was the latest in a series of major industrial mishaps around the world, some with immediate fatal results, others with lingering, long-term consequences. Last week in Taiwan, leaking methane gas in a coal shaft triggered an explosion that killed 33 miners. Two weeks earlier, a liquefied-natural-gas explosion claimed 452 lives near a Mexico City shantytown. As the list of such man-made tragedies grows, concern is rising everywhere that industrial safety standards are often higher in the U.S. than in developing countries, and that some U.S. firms may have opened plants abroad to take advantage of the disparity. Indeed, the accident in India touched off a wave of anticapitalist rhetoric. TASS, the Soviet news agency, called the disaster "the logical consequence of the general policy pursued by multinational corporations, which market low-quality products and outdated technology in developing countries." Said a U.S. embassy official in New Delhi: "This is a feast for the Communists. They'll go with it for weeks."

Prominent among the targets of that antibusiness backlash was Union Carbide. Within hours of the accident, police in Bhopal closed the plant and arrested its manager, J. Mukund, as well as four of his colleagues, on charges of "culpable homicide through negligence." When a team of five technical experts from Union Carbide's headquarters in Danbury, Conn., arrived to inspect the factory, they were turned away by local authorities. "We don't want anyone tampering with the evidence," said an official. The Indian Central Bureau of Investigation, meanwhile, seized records and logbooks at the plant, and Chief Minister Singh ordered a judicial inquiry into the accident. "This is a devastating tragedy," said Singh. "It was sudden and deadly, and there was a terrible human failure somewhere along the line. I have closed down the plant, probably forever."

Perhaps the most spectacular government action came when Warren M. Anderson, 63, Union Carbide's U.S. chairman, flew to Bhopal later in the week. Immediately after his arrival, he and two officials of the company's Indian subsidiary were arrested and charged with "negligence and criminal corporate liability" and "criminal conspiracy," which under Indian law carries a maximum penalty of death. Instead of being taken to prison, the three executives were detained at the company's comfortable Bhopal guesthouse, surrounded by 50 armed guards to protect them from possible mob attacks, and cut off from communication with the outside world. After more than six hours, Anderson was released on $2,500 bond and flown to New Delhi, while his colleagues remained in custody. "Somebody has to say that our safety standards in the U.S. are identical to those in India or Brazil or some place else," Anderson said after his release. "Same equipment, same design, same everything."

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 120DEG 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 100DEG 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 100DEG 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.

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.

India's Department of the Environment last July announced strict guidelines banning the location of plants that produce such hazardous substances as gases, poisons and explosives in areas where population growth is expected. But whether the ruling was supposed to govern facilities already constructed remained uncertain. More fundamentally, the safety restrictions ran counter to local governments' desire to attract industry. So far, not a single company has been denied permission to build. When the issue of the Union Carbide plant's permit arose in the Madhya Pradesh state assembly in December 1982, then Labor Minister Tarasingh Viyogi took pains to remind his listeners that the plant had cost $25 million to build. "The factory is not a small stone that can be shifted elsewhere," he argued. "There is no danger to Bhopal, nor will there be."

In Bhopal and elsewhere, medical authorities last week began to grow concerned about the long-term effects of exposure to methyl isocyanate. While there is no evidence that the chemical causes cancer, doctors in Bhopal believe that many survivors of the accident may suffer from emphysema, asthma or bronchitis. In addition, some medical experts suspect that the poisoning could result in damage to the liver and the kidneys, and could have other even more harrowing effects. "The gas affects the central nervous system," said Dr. Sanjay Mittal, a doctor at Hamidia Hospital. "In my opinion, this increases the chances of permanent mental retardation." One of Mittal's senior colleagues reported that there had been eight stillbirths at Hamidia on the first day after the accident. "Pregnant women were brought to me in great pain," he said. "They had to be aborted. Children in the womb had stopped kicking and bodies were rejecting fetuses."

A more hopeful diagnosis was provided by William Brown, associate professor of biological sciences at Carnegie-Mellon University. Both respiratory ailments and blindness in people exposed to low levels of the gas will, said Brown, "go away. A chemical reaction is taking place in which the molecules of isocyanate will be turned over and excreted by the system." Even Brown, however, conceded that Bhopal residents who received higher dosages would not be so fortunate. Those who endured total whitening of the eyes would, he admitted, never recover their sight, and those whose lungs were totally coated with gas would probably die of respiratory failure.

Despite the prospect of continuing medical damage, last week's tragedy may have a long-term salutary effect: it awakened a resolve across India that the episode not be repeated. "It is clear that safety standards in this country are unsatisfactory, and that every city with large industry has become a danger zone," editorialized the Indian Express, one of India's most prestigious English-language dailies. It was equally clear that the country, which in its 37 years of independence has weathered floods and famines, riots and rebellions, would nonetheless be haunted and chastened by last week's disaster for decades to come.

Again and again, Prime Minister Gandhi and his ministers reiterated last week their determination to impose, and enforce, new and stricter industrial safety regulations. "We are concerned not only about this plant but about similar places as well," said Gandhi at Bhopal. "I believe there must be an overall government policy change."

For all the resolutions, perhaps the most poignant comments came from agonized survivors like A. Raoof, a Bhopal farmer. "We never understood why they would build a factory containing poison gas close to where people live," said Raoof, still choking 30 hours after the gas seeped through his home. "They could have gone out in the jungle where no one lives. Now we are mourning our dead." As he spoke, silent processions of survivors carried the dead, wrapped in white cotton shrouds and covered with flowers, through the streets of the poisoned city to the nearby Chhola Vishram cremation site. There, four, five, six bodies were thrown onto a pyre that usually served only one. Rows upon rows of pyres burned through the night. -By Pico Iyer.

Reported by Dean Brelis/Bhopal

With reporting by Dean Brelis/Bhopal