Five Past Midnight in Bhopal

by Dominique Lapierre; Javier Moro

  Carbide had decided to play its hand openly, which was not always the case in the chemical industry. A whole chapter of its manual detailed the horrible effects of inhaling MIC: first severe pains in the chest, then suffocation and, finally, pulmonary edema and possible death. In case of such an incident, the manual advised that contaminated parts should be rinsed with water, oxygen should be administered, as well as medication to dilate the bronchia.

  All the same, Carbide did not publicly disclose all the information revealed by two secret studies undertaken at its request in 1963 and 1970 by the Mellon Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. These studies of the toxicity of methyl isocyanate showed that under the influence of heat it broke down into several molecules, which were also potentially fatal. Among these molecules was hydrocyanide acid, a gas with a sinister reputation, which when inhaled in strong doses, almost invariably caused immediate death. The two studies also revealed, however, the existence of an antidote to this fatal gas. Injection with sodium thiosulfate could, in certain cases, neutralize the deadly effects of the gas. Carbide had not seen fit to include this information in its documentation for MIC.

  It was in its new Institute plant on the banks of the Kanawha, that Carbide intended to make the MIC it needed for its annual production of thirty thousand tons of Sevin. Known as “Institute 2,” this plant was to operate in conditions so safe and with such regard for the environment that it would be an industrial model for the entire valley. Anchored in a sea of concrete, its metal structures were spread over five levels. Each was crammed with reactors, distillation columns, tanks, flares, condensers, furnaces, exchangers, pumps and a network of dozens of miles of piping of varying sizes and colors, according to what liquid or gas it conveyed.

  “It was a really beautiful plant,” would recount American engineer Warren Woomer. He had joined Carbide at the age of twenty-two and had become an expert on high-risk plants. “It’s true that you had a sense of danger when you went in there. But I had gotten used to living among toxic substances. After all, chemical engineers spend their lives in contact with dangerous products. You have to learn to respect them and, above all, you have to get to know them and learn how to handle them. If you make a mistake, there’s very little chance they’ll forgive you.”

  Warren Woomer knew that the piloting of this high-tech factory had been entrusted to the best professionals in the field. To belong to the MIC production unit was considered an honor on the Institute site. It also had its advantages as salaries there reflected the hazardous nature of the substances used: they were the highest in the company.

  Carbide had provided the plant with an impressive arsenal of security systems. There were countless decontamination towers and flares capable of neutralizing and burning off large quantities of gas in case of accidental leakage. Hundreds of valves enabled any fluid showing an abnormal pressure to be evacuated into diversion circuits. Successions of thermostatic sluice gates, one-way valves, joints, rupture discs, temperature sensors and pressure gauges watched over all the sensitive equipment and the piping, which had itself been put together with high resistance welding and checked by X ray. Damping devices prevented any excessive movement of the metal. As in the most modern airplanes, the electric circuitry had been duplicated and protected to resist the onslaught of even the most corrosive acids. In the event of electricity failure, superpowerful generators would immediately cut in. Special double-skinned piping had been installed to conduct the MIC to its storage tanks. Between the skins a flux of nitrogen was circulated. Every ten yards sensors checked the purity of the gas. The tiniest escape of MIC into the nitrogen would be detected immediately and trigger an alarm and immediate intervention.

  To ensure total reliability, the builders of Institute 2 had their high-performance equipment produced by International Nickel and Ingersol Rand, among the United States’ most eminent specialists in alloying and mechanical engineering.

  No less exceptional precautions had been taken to ensure the safety of the staff. A network of loudspeakers and sirens, modulating differently according to the nature of the incident, was ready to go into action at the slightest alert. Crews of firemen specialized in chemical fires and a system of automatic sprinklers could flood the factory with carbonic foam in a matter of minutes. Dozens of red-painted boxes on every level equipped the workers with protective suits, breathing apparatus, ocular rinses and decontamination showers. The plant was even equipped with a monitoring system that was constantly analyzing samples taken from the atmosphere. If the safety level was exceeded, a loud alarm would sound and the location of the anomaly would appear on a screen.

  With its walls studded with pressure gauges, levers and buttons, the control room looked like the flight deck on a Concorde. Day and night, different colored markers traced the plant’s every breath on rolls of graph paper. Keys, levers and handles relayed electronic orders to open or close the stop-cocks, shut down or activate a circuit, launch or interrupt a production or maintenance operation. One of the dials most carefully monitored was a temperature gauge. It was linked to thermometers located on each of the tanks of methyl isocyanate used in the continuous production of Sevin. Given that the needles on these instruments must never rise above 0° C, the builders of the American factory had lined the walls of the tanks with a skein of coils that circulated cooling chloroform.

  It was on the smell, or rather the lack thereof, that the initial results of these unprecedented efforts were judged. A properly sealed chemical plant does not give off any smell. Such was not the case with the factories polluting the Kanawha Valley with emissions that none of its two hundred and fifty thousand residents could escape. “The smells ended up permeating the trees, flowers, the river water and even the air we breathed,” complained Pamela Nixon, a thirty-eight-year-old laboratory assistant at the Saint Francis Hospital in South Charleston. Along with several hundred other black families, she lived in the Perkins Avenue area, close by the tanks and chimneys of the Institute works. A few days before the launch of the new factory, Pamela and her neighbors found a leaflet in their mailboxes sent by Union Carbide’s local management. Entitled Plan for the General Evacuation of Institute, this document listed the procedures to be observed in case of an incident. The first instruction was to stay put. “Switch your radio to WCAW station, 689 meters medium wave, or your television to channel 8 on station WCHS,” the document instructed. “This is the kind of announcement that you are likely to hear: At ten o’clock this morning, the West Virginia state police reported an industrial accident involving dangerous chemical substances. The accident occurred at 09.50 hours at the Institute site of the Union Carbide Company. All persons living in the vicinity are invited to remain in their homes, close their doors and windows, turn off all fans and air-conditioning systems, and keep a listening watch for further instructions. The next communication will be broadcast in five minutes.” Pamela Nixon taped the sheet of paper to a corner of her fridge door.

  Two weeks later, when the new plant had begun production, the young woman suddenly noticed a strange smell coming in through her kitchen window. It was being carried on the breeze blowing, as usual, from the direction of the industrial structures located upwind of her home. It was neither the smell of fish nor the odor of rotten eggs that she had grown accustomed to. This new smell went to show that even if the plant she could see from her house was a model of advanced technology, it was not, in fact, totally sealed. However it triggered a childhood memory. Like her mother’s cooking every Sunday after church, the methyl isocyanate produced by Union Carbide smelled like boiled cabbage. *

  10

  They Deserved the Mercy of God

  The figure who entered the Orya Bustee one morning took Belram Mukkadam by surprise. He had never before seen a European venture into the neighborhood. Tall, dressed in a black, ankle-length robe, with a metal cross strung across her chest, her gray hair boyishly cropped and thick round glasses taking up much of her thin face, she sported a luminous
smile. Mukkadam welcomed her with his customary friendliness.

  “What a pleasant surprise! Welcome, sister. What wind of good fortune brings you here?” he asked.

  The visitor saluted him the Indian way. “I’ve heard your neighborhood needs someone to provide medical care for the sick, the children and the elderly. Well, here I am. I’ve come to offer you my humble services.”

  Mukkadam bowed almost to the ground.

  “Bless you, sister! The god has sent you. There’s so much suffering to be relieved here.”

  Forty-nine-year-old Sister Felicity McIntyre was Scottish. Born into a diplomatic family that had spent long periods in France, at eighteen she had entered a missionary order. Sent first to Senegal, then to Ceylon and finally to India, she had spent the last fourteen years in Bhopal where she ran a center for abandoned children. Most of them were suffering from serious mental handicaps. The center had been established in a modern building in the south of the city. It bore the beautiful name of “Ashanitekan”—House of Hope. Above the entrance the nun had nailed a plate with the inscription: “When God closes one door, he opens another.” Children with Down’s syndrome, autism, tuberculosis of the bone, polio; blind, deaf and mute children—all lived together in a single large room with pale green walls decorated with pictures of Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ.

  There, several young girls trained by Sister Felicity busied themselves with the children, helping them move, walk or play. Parallel bars, rubber balls, swivel boards and small pedal-cars took the place of physiotherapy equipment. Here life was stronger than any misfortune. Many of the patients needed special care. They had to be dressed, fed, taken to the toilet, washed. Above all, their intelligence had to be awakened, a task that demanded endless patience and love. Sister Felicity shared her bedroom with a mentally retarded twelve-year-old. Suffering from spina bifida, a paralysis of the spinal column, Nadia was as dependent as a baby. But her smile proclaimed her will to live and her gratitude. Although she refuted the idea, Sister Felicity was to Bhopal what Mother Teresa was to Calcutta.

  Mukkadam led the nun through the labyrinth of alleyways.

  “This is a really wretched place,” he apologized.

  “I’m used to it,” his visitor reassured him, greeting those who gathered along her way with a cheerful namaste.*

  She went into several huts and examined some of the children. Rickets, alopecia, intestinal infections … Orya Bustee had the full collection of diseases found in poverty-stricken neighborhoods. The nun was on familiar ground, and no stranger to the slums. She was always willing to enter people’s homes, or sit down with them, regardless of their caste or creed. She had learned to receive the confidences of the dying, to watch over the dead, to pray with their families, wash corpses and accompany the deceased on their last journey to the cemetery or the funeral pyre. Above all, with the assistance of her large, black, simulated-leather bag full of medicines and small surgical instruments, she had treated people, comforted and cured them.

  “I’ll come every Monday morning,” she announced in Hindi. “I’ll need some families to take turns at letting me use their huts.”

  The suggestion gave rise to an immediate commotion. All the mothers were prepared to offer the white didi, or “big sister,” the use of their lodgings so that she could care for the occupants of the bustee.

  “And then I’ll need a volunteer to help me,” she added, casting a discerning eye around the faces crowded about her.

  “Me, me, didi!”

  Felicity turned to see a little girl with slanting eyes.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Padmini.”

  “All right, Padmini, I’ll take you on trial as my assistant in our small clinic.”

  On the following Monday an expectant line had formed in the alleyway in front of Padmini’s hut, well before Sister Felicity arrived. Padmini had tried to sort out the most serious cases in order to take them first. More often than not, these were rickety babies with swollen stomachs whom their mothers held out to the nun with a look of entreaty.

  “In all my years of working in Africa, Ceylon and India, I had never seen such cases of deficiency diseases. The fontanels had not even closed up in many of the children. The bone of their skulls had become deformed for lack of calcium and their dolichocephalic features made them look a bit like Egyptian mummies,” Sister Felicity recounted.

  Tuberculosis might be the number one killer in Orya Bustee and its neighboring slums, but typhoid, tetanus, malaria, polio, gastrointestinal infections and skin diseases caused damage that was often irreversible. Confronted with all these poor people looking to her for miracles, the nun felt all the strength go out of her. Sensing her fatigue, Padmini gently mopped the large beads of sweat coursing down her forehead, threatening to impede her vision. Rising above the nauseating smells and horrific sights, the young Indian girl supported her big sister with her unfailing smile. The little girl’s expression, it too born of suffering and poverty, revived the nun’s courage whenever it faltered.

  One day a woman deposited an extremely emaciated baby on the table. Sister Felicity entrusted the tiny shriveled body to Padmini.

  “Take him and massage him gently,” she told her. “That’s all we can do.”

  Padmini sat down on a jute sack in the alleyway and placed the child in her lap. She poured a little mustard oil on her hands and began to massage the small body. Her hands came and went along its upper torso and limbs. Like a succession of waves, they started on the baby’s sides, worked across his chest and up to the opposite shoulder. Stomach, legs, heels, the soles of his feet, his hands, his head, the nape of his neck, his face, the wings of his nose, his back and his buttocks were successively stroked and vitalized, as if nourished by Padmini’s supple, dancing fingers. The child suddenly began to gurgle for sheer bliss. “I was dazzled by so much skill, beauty and intelligence,” Felicity would later say. “In the depths of that slum I had just discovered an unsuspected power of love and hope. The people of Orya Bustee deserved the mercy of God.”

  11

  “A Hand for the Future”

  Out of the thirty-eight countries on the planet where Union Carbide had hoisted its blue-and-white flag, no other had established such long-standing and warm links with the company as India. Perhaps this was due to the fact that for nearly a century the multinational had been providing a commodity as precious as air or water. For hundreds of millions of Indians who had no electricity, Carbide’s lamps brought light to the most remote villages. Thanks to the half a billion batteries made in its factories each year, the whole of India knew and blessed the American company’s name.

  The rich profits from this monopoly and Carbide’s conviction that the country would one day become one of the world’s great markets, had induced the company to regroup all kinds of production under the aegis of an Indian subsidiary known as Union Carbide India Limited. So it was that the flag of this subsidiary fluttered over fourteen factories. In India, Carbide manufactured chemical products, plastic goods, photographic plates, film, industrial electrodes, polyester resin, laminated glass and machine tools. The company also had its own fleet of seven trawlers on the Bengal coast, specializing in deep-water shrimping. With an annual revenue of $170 million in 1984, Union Carbide India Limited was a successful example of the corporation’s globalization policy. Of course, Union Carbide retained ownership of 51 percent of the shares in its Indian subsidiary, the intention being that the parent company would control all production and any new projects on Indian soil.

  In April of 1962, the American management of Carbide revealed the nature and scope of its new projects in a full-page advertisement in National Geographic magazine. Entitled “Science Helps to Build a New India,” the illustration was meant to be allegorical. It depicted a dark-skinned, emaciated peasant working obviously infertile soil with the aid of a primitive plow drawn by two lean oxen. Two women in saris with a pitcher of water and a basket on their heads, surveyed the scene. In
the background appeared the waters of a mighty river, the Ganges. Just beyond the sacred river, glittering with a thousand fires in the sunlight, arose the gilded structures of a gigantic chemical complex with its towers, chimneys, pipework and tanks. Above it, in the upper half of the picture, a light-skinned hand emerged from the orange sky. Between thumb and index finger it was holding a test tube full of a red liquid, which it was pouring over the peasant and his plow. Carbide had no doubt drawn its inspiration from the scene on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in which Michelangelo portrays the hand of God touching Adam’s to give him life. Under the heading, “A Hand for the Future,” the company delivered its message in the space of a single paragraph:

  Cattle working in the fields … the eternal River Ganges … elephants caparisoned with jewels … Today these symbols of ancient India coexist with a new vision, that of modern industry. India has built factories to strengthen its economy and provide its four hundred and fifty million people with the promise of a bright future. But India needs the technological knowledge of the Western world. That is why Union Carbide, working with Indian engineers and technicians, has made its scientific resources available to help construct a large plant to produce chemical products and plastic goods near Bombay. All over the free world, Union Carbide has undertaken to build plants to manufacture chemical products, plastic goods, gases and alloys. Union Carbide’s collaborators are proud to be able to share their knowledge and skills with the citizens of this great country.