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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (65073)	12/4/1999 1:35:00 PM
From: Alexander	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Thst was a CHEMICAL PLANT MAKING FERTILIZER..THE NATIVES WERE TAKING THE POWDERED CHEMICAL FERTILIZER TO MAKE BREAD FROM..I was in the Middle East at the time this happened...

To: epicure who wrote (65073)	12/5/1999 12:38:00 AM
From: nihil	Respond to of 108807

Yes Bhopal was an insecticide plant. There are several books and thousands of articles on the subject. the plant was owned by a subsidiary of Union Carbide. The government of India bears a lot of blame for what happened. It owned 20 per cent or so of the stock in Union Carbide of India Limited. It had required UC to build the plant and manufacture insecticides as a condition of the rest of their business (batteries at the time). They had required UC to use Indian engineering firms (who know nothing of building some plants) to design the plant. The plant management were Indian nationals, and had been warned of safety violations by a mission from UC in America. UC was operating a much safer plant in Institute West Virginia. The Bhopal design required holding large amounts of a toxic intermediate in cooled tank storage. Apparently, a untrained and unsupervised worker (many skill workers, technicians, and engineers had been hired away to work in the Middle East) may have (probably did) backwashed the connecting pipe without installed a dam to prevent water from contaminating Methyl Isocyanate which was converted into toxic gases and escaped through an nonfunctioning combustion tower. The plant had previously been squated near by thousands of homeless Indians. A perfectly predictable disaster which neither national (one inspector for 1000 plants) or local (bribed by UCIL) officials would prevent, although they had the authority to do so. This case is used in management classes all around the world. The "school solution" is 1. Stay out of India, or any other country that interferes with technical or safety concerns. 2. Take no responsibility for anything that you cannot control. 3. If you cannot operate a hazardous facility safely, shut it down. 4. Shut down unprofitable hazardouos operations immediately (Bhopal was losing money big time and had never made a profit). 5. Don't store unnecessarily large amounts of hazardous materials.