“At Institute,” the Indian engineer would say, “the posters of which the management seemed most proud were not graphs tracking the rise of Sevin sales, but safety awards the company’s various factories throughout the world had won.”
21
The First Deadly Drops from the “Beautiful Plant”
No plaque commemorates the day when the Titanic was launched with a bottle of champagne before plowing through the waves for the very first time. Nor does any history book make reference to May 4, 1980, the date that the first factory exported from the West to make pesticides using methyl isocyanate began production. Yet for the men who had built it, that day was “cause for jubilation” as one of them would later say. Thirteen years after Eduardo Muñoz’s gray Jaguar had first pulled up to the Kali Grounds, a dream was coming true.
With speeches, the handing out of gifts, garlands and sweets, the company with the blue-and-white logo had assembled several hundred guests under multicolored shamianas to mark the occasion. Dignitaries, ministers, senior civil servants, directors of the company, personnel from the various units— ranging from the foreman to the humblest operator—stood together at the foot of this remarkable structure. The engineers, both American and Indian, made no secret of their delight and relief at having surmounted the obstacles of a long and difficult process.
The new CEO of Union Carbide had come over from the United States especially for the event. Tall, athletic-looking, with a white plastic safety helmet atop his thick gray hair, Warren Anderson towered above the assembly. The son of a humble Swedish carpenter who had immigrated to Brooklyn, at fifty-nine he epitomized the fulfillment of the American dream. Equipped with a degree in chemistry and another in law, in thirty-five years he had climbed the ladder to the top of the world’s third largest chemical giant. The empire he now ran comprised seven hundred plants employing 117,000 people in thirty-eight countries. For this passionate fisherman who loved gardening at his Connecticut home, the birth of the Bhopal plant was a decisive step toward his life’s principal objective. Anderson wanted to turn Union Carbide into a company with a human face, a firm in which respect for moral values would carry as much weight as the rise of its shares on the stock market. Thanks to the Sevin that the Carbide teams were going to manufacture here, tens of thousands of peasants could protect their families from the ancestral curse of starvation. With a garland of marigolds around his neck, Warren Anderson had every reason to be proud and happy. This plant was a triumphant step in his remarkable career.
Getting the installation up and running had involved three challenging months of intensive preparation. Finding and training technicians in the heart of India who could cope with any emergency had been no easy matter. There were eighty entries on the list of possible problems, many of them extremely serious.
“You don’t launch such a complex plant like you turn the ignition key in a car,” Pareek would explain. “We were dealing with a kind of metal dinosaur, complete with its bad temper, its whims, its weaknesses and its birth deformities. Waking up a monster like that and bringing it to life, with its hundreds of miles of piping, its thousands of valves, joints, pumps, reactors, tanks and instruments was a task worthy of the building of the pyramids.”
It began with a rigorous check of the sealing of all circuits. The pipework was flushed repeatedly with nitrogen. To detect any leaks in the connecting joints, safety valves, pressure gauges and sluices were smeared with a soapy coating. The smallest bubble alerted the operators. Next, one by one, all the hundreds of bolts that held together the various pieces of equipment had to be tightened. Once the system was determined to be functioning correctly, the engineers began heating up the two gases, which, when brought together, would produce methyl isocyanate. These two components—phosgene and monomethylamine—had themselves been obtained by combining other substances. As the temperature of the gases rose, the operators opened up the circuits one by one. The few privileged people present in the control room held their breath. The fateful moment was approaching. John Luke Couvaras checked the dials on the reactors’ temperature and pressure gauges. Then he cried, “Go!” Whereupon an operator activated a circuit that sent the phosgene and the monomethylamine into the same steel cylinder. The combination produced a gaseous reaction. This gas was at once cooled down again, purified and liquefied. Then came a burst of applause. Six years after setting off an atomic explosion, India had just produced its first drops of methyl isocyanate.
“We weren’t able to see the first trickle of MIC,” Pareek later recalled, “because it went straight into the holding chamber. But as soon as the chamber was full we put on our protective suits to take a sample of a few centiliters of the liquid. I carried the container with as much respect as if it had been a statue of Durga to the laboratory to have the contents analyzed. We were thrilled at the result. Our Indian MIC was as pure a vintage as Kanawha Valley’s!”
While Union Carbide’s tanks were filling up, a celebration of a very different kind was going on at the southern boundary of the Kali Grounds. Belram Mukkadam, Rahul, Ganga Ram, Ratna Nadar and many of the other residents of Orya Bustee gathered around the five horned beasts the cattle merchant had just delivered. With the compensation money paid out by Carbide, Mukkadam had decided to replace his cow Parvati with a bull. He called it Nandi, after the bull the god Shiva had taken as his mount because it kept all danger and evil at bay. That night, by the light of the full moon, he marked the animal’s forehead with the trident of the god. It was an emblem that augured well. Mukkadam was sure it would guarantee the fertility of the new herd and ensure divine protection on the Kali Grounds’ bustees.
22
Three Tanks Dressed up for a Carnival
By appointing one of its best men to the helm of the Indian pesticide plant, the American multinational was signaling the degree of control it expected to exercise over the Bhopal installation. Modest, almost timid-looking behind his thick glasses, Warren Woomer was one of Carbide’s most experienced and respected engineers. Moreover, he was familiar with India and Bhopal after having carried out two assignments there. He had helped get up the unit that produced alpha naphthol, a substance used in the composition of Sevin. And he also had been instrumental in the launching of the Sevin plant, checking to be certain that his Indian colleagues were correctly applying everything he had taught them at Institute.
Being an American in charge of a thousand Indians of different origins, castes, religions and languages was the toughest challenge of his career. Woomer began with a detailed inspection of the ship.
“I couldn’t find anything fundamental at fault,” he would recall. “Of course the control room would seem obsolete to us now, but at the time it was the best that India could produce. I noticed nothing really shocking about either the design or the functioning of the plant. In any case my bible was the MIC manual of use with its forty pages of instructions. Every one of them was to be treated as Gospel truth, especially the directive to keep the MIC in the storage tanks at a temperature close to zero degrees Celsius. On this point I had decided to be intractable. Yes, it was imperative that every single drop of MIC was kept at zero degrees. What’s more, my long honeymoon with some of the most dangerous chemical substances made me add one recommendation to the MIC manual of use. I considered it vitally important: only stock a minimum quantity of methyl isocyanate on site.”
Although he had encountered no problems at a technical level, Woomer still realized that many things could be improved, notably the way in which staff members performed their tasks.
“For example, no one took the precaution of wearing safety goggles,” he would remember. “One day I put my hand over one of the operator’s eyes. ‘That’s how your children and grandchildren are likely to see your face if you don’t protect your eyes,’ I told him severely. The story did the rounds of the plant and, next day, I found everyone wearing safety goggles. I realized then that in India you had to touch people through the heart.”
There
were plenty of other problems in store for the new captain. Firstly, how was he to remember the unpronounceable names of so many of his colleagues?
“Sathi,” he said one day to his secretary, “you’re going to teach me the correct pronunciation of the first and last names of everyone working in the plant, including those of their wives and children. And I’d like you to point out any mistakes I make because of my ignorance of the ways and customs of your country.”
“Sahb,” * the young woman replied, “in India, employees don’t tell their bosses what to do.”
“I’m not asking you to tell me what to do,” replied Woomer sharply. “I’m asking you to help me be as good a boss as possible.”
Warren Woomer was to discover, often at personal cost, the extreme subtlety of relationships in Indian society, where every individual occupies a special place in a myriad of hierarchies.
“I learned never to make a remark to anyone in the presence of his superior,” he would say. “I learned never to announce a decision without everyone having had the chance to express a view so that it appeared to be the result of a collective choice. But, above all, I learned who Rama was, who Ganesh, Vishnu and Shiva were; what events the festivals of Moharam or Ishtema commemorated; who Guru Nanak was and who was the god of work my employees worshipped so ardently and whose name was so difficult to remember.”
The god Warren Woomer could not remain ignorant of was Vishvakarma, one of the giants in the Hindu pantheon. In Indian mythology he personifies creative power, and the sacred texts glorify him as the “architect of the universe, the all-seeing god who disposes of all the worlds, gives the divinities their names and exists beyond mortal comprehension.” He is also the one who fashions the weapons and tools of the gods. He is lord of the arts and carpenter of the cosmos, builder of the celestial chariots and creator of all ornaments. That is why he is the tutelary god of artisans and patron of all the crafts that enable humankind to subsist.
Every year after the September moon, his effigy is borne triumphantly into all workplaces—from the smallest workroom to the largest factory. This is a privileged time of communication between bosses and workers, when celebrations unite rich and poor in shared worship and prayer.
Overnight the reactors, pumps and distillation columns of the Bhopal plant were decorated with wreaths of jasmine and marigold in honor of Vishvakarma. The three great tanks due to contain tens of thousands of gallons of MIC were draped in fabrics of many colors, making them look like carnival floats. The vast Sevin formulation unit, where the festivities were to be held, was covered in carpets and its walls were decorated with streamers and garlands of flowers. Workmen brought cases full of hammers, nails, pliers and hundreds of other tools, which they deposited on the ground and decorated with foliage and flowers. Others set up the colossal altar in which the statue of the god would be installed on a cushion of rose petals. Riding on his elephant covered by a cloth encrusted with precious stones, Vishvakarma looked like a maharajah. He wore a tunic embroidered with gold thread and studded with jewels. One could tell he was not a human being in that he had wings and four arms brandishing an ax, a hammer, a bow and a balance. Several hundred engineers, machine operators, foremen and workmen, most accompanied by their wives and children, and all dressed in their festival clothes, soon filled the work floor. Squatting barefoot in this sea of humanity, Warren and Betty Woomer, the only foreigners, watched the colorful ceremony with astonishment and respect.
After intoning mantras into a microphone, a pandit with a shaven head placed the sacred objects on a thali, a ritual silver plate. First the purifying fire—burning oil in a clay dish—then rose petals, a few small balls of sweet pastry, a handful of rice and finally the sindoor, a little pile of scarlet powder. Ringing his small bell vigorously, the pandit blessed the collection of tools laid out by the workers. A solitary voice then rang out, promptly followed by a hundred others. “Vishvakarma kijai! Long live Vishvakarma!” That was the signal. The ceremony was over and the festivities could commence. The management of the factory had arranged for a banquet of meat curry and vegetables, lassi and puri, little cakes of fried wheat puffed up into balloons, to be prepared in a nearby kitchen. Beer and palm wine flowed like water. The alarm system’s loudspeakers poured out a stentorian flood of popular tunes and firecrackers went off on all sides. Employers and employees gave themselves up to celebration.
Like most of those in charge of the beautiful plant, Warren and Betty Woomer were not aware that the occupants of the neighboring bustees were gathered with similar fervor around the god of tools. There was, after all, an extraordinary concentration of workers in those areas, too. The workshops belonging to the shoemaker Iqbal, the sari embroiderer Ahmed Bassi and the bicycle repairman Salar, were just three small links in a whole chain of workplaces in which devotees of Vishvakarma labored in order to survive. In Jai Prakash and Chola, children supported their families by cutting up sheets of brass to make tools, or dipping fountain pen caps in chrome baths that gave off noxious fumes. Elsewhere, youngsters slowly poisoned themselves making matches and firecrackers, handling phosphorous, zinc oxide and asbestos powder. In poorly ventilated workshops that smelled of burning oil and overheated metal, emaciated men laminated, soldered and fitted pieces of iron-work together. A few paces away from the spacious house belonging to the Sikh moneylender Pulpul Singh, a dozen men sitting cross-legged made bidis. Nearly all of them suffered from tuberculosis and thus lacked the strength to pedal a rickshaw or pull a tilagari, a hand cart. Provided they did not stop for a single minute, they could roll up to thirteen hundred cigarettes a day. Every evening a tharagar would come from the town to collect what they had produced. For one thousand bidis, they received twelve rupees, the price of two kilos of rice.
How surprised Chairman Anderson and his works manager Warren Woomer would have been if ever they had chanced upon those places where so many men and children spent their lives making springs, truck parts, axles for weaving looms, bolts, gas tanks and even turbine gears to the tenth of a micron; men and children, who with a surprising degree of dexterity, inventiveness and resourcefulness, could produce, copy, repair or renovate any part or machine. Here the smallest scrap of metal, the lowliest bit of debris was reused, transformed, adapted. Here nothing was ever thrown away. Everything was always re-born, as if by some miracle.
In anticipation of the festival, labor had stopped in the workshops on the previous day, and everyone had scrambled to clean, repaint and adorn the rooms with garlands of foliage and flowers. The workers of Orya, Chola and Jai Prakash also made the god of tools proud.
In the space of one night, hellholes had been transformed into places of worship strewn with flowers and adorned with sumptuously decorated temporary altars. The traditional chromo of the four-armed god perched on his elephant was everywhere. Yesterday’s slaves had changed into gleaming shirts and brand new lunghis; their wives had got out their festival saris, preserved in the family coffers from the greed of the cockroaches. The children were equally resplendent. The entire local population squeezed in behind a brass and drum band whose flourishes resounded through the alleyways. The godfather Omar Pasha was present, with a wife on either side of him, each dressed up like a queen in a silk sari that Ahmed Bassi had embroidered and encrusted with pearls. The Muslim tailor was there as well, for the festivities transcended all religious differences. With his crony the goateed mullah beside him, the sorcerer Nilamber, who was acting as pandit, led the procession from workshop to workshop, saying mantras and blessing the tools with purifying fire. Behind him, Padmini walked proudly, in a long dress made out of scarlet cotton, a gift from Sister Felicity. The young Indian girl had persuaded the nun to join in the celebrations. When they spotted the cross around the sister’s neck, many of the workers asked her to come and bless their tools in the name of her god. “Praise to you, oh God of the universe, who gives our daily bread, for your children in Orya Bustee, Chola and Jai Prakash love and believe in you,” Sister Felicity
repeated fervently in each workshop. “And rejoice with them at this day of light in all the hardship of their lives.”
23
“Half a Million Hours of Work and Not a Day Lost”
The City of the Begums could not help but bless the chairman of Carbide. No other industrial enterprise housed within Bhopal’s ancient walls had been quite so concerned about its image; no other was quite so solicitous toward its staff. Each day brought new examples of this extraordinary behavior. In the plant, Muslim workers had a place of prayer facing Mecca; Hindus had little altars dedicated to their principal gods. During the Hindu festival in honor of the goddess Durga, the management gave the workers a generator to light her richly decorated statue. The material advantages were no less plentiful. A special fund enabled employees to borrow money for weddings and festivals. The insurance and pension plans put the factory ahead of most Indian firms. A canteen, accessible to all, dispensed meals for a token price of two rupees.
In accordance with what they had been taught in Institute, however, it was the safety of their staff that was the prime concern of the plant management. Carbide equipped Bhopal’s Hamidia Hospital with ultramodern resuscitation equipment, which could treat several victims of gas poisoning simultaneously. The gift was greeted with public celebrations widely reported in the press. In addition a hospital infirmary stocked with respiratory equipment, a radiology unit and a laboratory, was built at the very entrance to the site. “We were convinced all these precautions were unnecessary,” Kamal Pareek said afterward, “but they were part of the safety culture with which we had been inculcated.” Yet this same culture accommodated some surprising deficiencies. The medical staff that Carbide hired did not have any specific training in the effects of gas-related accidents, especially those caused by methyl isocyanate.
Five Past Midnight in Bhopal Page 13