Today is the 39th anniversary of the world's worst industrial disaster at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. Although this was duly noted in India and in the international press, I didn’t see any mentions in the U.S. media.
Perhaps I just didn’t look in any of the right places.
The explosion at the facility was specifically an American problem, however, because Union Carbide was an American company using American technology, which was demonstrably inferior at that time to safer methods developed by German and Japanese companies.
As I described in The Bhopal Syndrome, when they heard the emergency alarm ring, villagers living in the shadow of the plant ran toward it, to try and help out, not away from it, which would have saved their lives.
Thousands died as a result.
Union Carbide had never informed the people living nearby how dangerous the chemicals mixed there were, nor how to protect themselves should an explosion occur.
It's a shameful date in American history; one we ought not allow ourselves to forget. In the book, I argued that the best way to prevent similar disasters were global reforms like freedom of information acts and right to know legislation.
Two simple tools and two of the key building blocks of democracy — FOIA and RTK. The world has embraced those principles to a great extent in recent decades, which is positive because chemical plant explosions still occur.
And that’s one good reason to remember Bhopal.
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