Raghu Rai, an Indian photojournalist and photographer, formerly worked with India today (Indian weekly magazine & news television channel) and covered the World’s Worst Industrial Disaster, The Bhopal Gas Tragedy. The picture shown above is captured by Raghu Rai and invades our mind with feart.
This gas tragedy occurred in Bhopal’s multinational Union Carbide Corporation's pesticide formulation plant. Around 40 tons menthyl-iso-cyanate gas leaked on 2nd December, 1984 causing instantaneous deaths of more than 20,000 people over the two weeks. Nearly half of the Bhopal’s then populations were severely affected. People had not known what hit them, and ran for shelters which led to excessive inhalation of the deadly gas. More than 1, 00,000 children
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In May 1982, three American engineers from the chemical products and household plastics division of UCC came to Bhopal. Their task was to appraise the running of the plant and confirm that everything was functioning according to the standards laid down by UCC. The report revealed that the Bhopal plant has lacked a lot of securities and workmanship. The report described the surroundings of the site as being 'strewn with oily old drums, used piping, pools of used oil and chemical waste likely to cause fire. It condemned the shoddy workmanship on certain connections, the warping of equipment, the corrosion of several circuits, the absence of automatic sprinklers and the risk of explosion in the gas evacuation flares. It also reported leaks of phosgene, MIC and chloroform, ruptures in pipe work and sealed joints, absence of any earth wire on one of the three MIC tanks and poor adjustment of certain devises where excessive pressure could lead to water entering the circuits. At the same time, the report expressed concern at the inadequately trained staff, unsatisfactory instruction methods and sloppy maintenance reports. In October 1982, MIC escaped from a broken valve, seriously affecting four workers and causing eye irritation and breathlessness among people in the nearby communities. This incident was a clear indication of the potential risk to public life. In …show more content…
Other essential equipment, such as the scrubber cylinder used to decontaminate any gas leaks, was subsequently deactivated. All this served as a signal for many well-trained and experienced engineers and operators to leave the Bhopal factory in search of more secure and satisfactory employment. Between one-half and two-thirds of the skilled engineers who had worked with the plant right from the project stage had left the plant by 1983. Analysts felt that the top officials at UCC were neglecting the Bhopal plant because they were no longer interested in it.
The Bhopal plant was licensed to manufacture 5,000 tons of MIC based pesticides per year. However, the production was nearly half of required amount and so incurred loss amounting to Rs. 50 million. UCC planned to close the plant and put it up for sale. When no buyer came forward in India, plans were made to dismantle the factory and ship it to another country. Negotiations to this end were completed by the end of November 1984. Financial losses and plans to dismantle the plant exacerbated UCIL's already negligent management
dangers in the nuclear plant because the bosses just ignored it. The bosses and workers are not
On June 23, 1985, a bomb was planted on Air India Flight 182 that exploded and killed the 329 passengers and crew while airborne (Commission of Inquiry into the Investigation of the Bombing of Air India Flight 182: Final report, 2010). A second bomb at Tokyo’s Narita Airport killed two baggage handlers that were unloading luggage from a Canadian Pacific Airlines flight, the baggage was also prepared to be on the Air India flight. Sikh terrorists were responsible for planting the two bombs. In total 331 people were killed (CIIBAIF 182, 2010).
The United States Enrichment Corporation (Producer). (2013). USEC issues WARN act notices to Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant workers [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.usec.com/news/usec-issues-warn-act-notices-paducah-gaseous-diffusion-plant-workers
"Chemical Warfare Agents - Resources on the health effects from chemical weapons, emergency response & treatment, counterterrorism, and emergency preparedness.au.af." Specialized Information Services - Reliable information on toxicology, environmental health, chemistry, HIV/AIDS, and minority health. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 May 2010.
At the end I come to conclusion that BP was not properly prepared for any disaster like that there risk assessment related to project is very limited and even not considered seriously about it for their own progress and putting live of public and employees in danger by not following the standard SOP of particular project. Even after incident happened they try to close their eyes on reality. The company should take this incident as alarm and should implement proper risk assessment for future and also compensate damages on ethical ground and if they counter this situation in good way their loss of bad reputation will be lesser as it predicted to be they should considered their responsibility towards society as well by doing this they not only making other people lives better but also earning good will to their company.
Fries, A. A., & West, C. J. (1921) The 'Standard' of the 'Standard'. Chemical warfare. New York [etc.] :. McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.. Heller, C. E. (1985).
This is not the first time that BP is at fault. They have had criminal convictions in places such as Endicott Bay in Alaska, Texas City and Prudhoe Bay. Jeanne Pascal was a part of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and was assigned to watch over BP. Pascal was watching over companies such as BP that were facing debarment. Under her watch, BP was charged with four federal crimes. Over the past twelve years, Pascal’s seen BP patterns as misconducts. She attempted to warn the government about BP’s safety and environmental issues that would most likely lead to another disaster. While she was watching over BP, the company misinformed and misled her about things that resulted to the felonies that they have committed. Sensing that some things were not right about the company, she presented a case of their unsafe working environments.
“On March 23, 2005, at 1:20 pm, the BP Texas City Refinery suffered one of the worst industrial disasters in recent U.S. history. Explosions and fires killed 15 people and injured another 180, alarmed the community, and resulted in financial losses exceeding $1.5 billion.” (U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, 2007) There are many small and big decisions and oversights that led to the incident. Underneath all the specific actions or inaction is a blatant disregard for addressing safety violations and procedures that had been pointed out to BP even years before this event. The use of outdated equipment and budget cuts also contributed to the circumstances that allowed this accident to happen.
Travelling at a speed twice that of sound might seem to be something futuristic; however, this feat has already been achieved almost 40 years ago by the world’s only supersonic passenger aircraft-The Concorde. Concorde brought a revolution in the aviation industry by operating transatlantic flights in less than four hours. The slick and elegant aircraft with one of the most sophisticated engineering was one of the most coveted aircrafts of its time. However, this was all destined to end when Air France Flight 4590 was involved in a tragic disaster just outside the city of Paris on July 25, 2000. The crash killed 113 people, but more disastrous was its impact. The belief and confidence people had with Concorde gradually started to fade, and finally Concorde was grounded after two and a half years of the crash. Official reports state that the main cause of the crash was a piece of metal dropped by a Continental aircraft that flew moments before Concorde, but, over the last decade, the report has met a lot of criticism, and many alternative hypotheses have thus been proposed.
As for the management of Union Carbide¡¦s Bhopal plant, some steps indeed needed to be improved. Let us take a look at the whole process of the gas leak and see what actions can be improved. The first mistake in my opinion was that R. Khan, an operator in the MIC complex, neglected to insert a slip blind above the point of water entry. This omission violated instructions in the MIC processing manual, the technical manual that set forth procedures established by the chemical engineers who set up the plant. Obviously, the plant failed to emphasize the importance of obeying the processing manual and the danger of disobeying ...
"The History of Plant Incidents at Formosa Plastics and Past Safety Violations." Industrial Injury Attorneys. http://www.industrialinjuryattorney.com/Industrial-Accident-Blog/2013/May/The-History-of-Plant-Incidents-at-Formosa-Plasti.aspx (accessed April 3, 2014).
The training facility that Giffels firm was contracted to do civil engineering work for had recently switched from using jet fuel to liquid propane to prevent soil contamination. While this was a solution to environmental concerns it created new problems that Giffels found to be unaddressed with the lack of a design analysis for any safety systems.
She moreover mentions few noticeable features of Regime-Made Disaster like: though the disaster is fully visible, but citizens are trained not to recognize it as a disaster consequently it is a long time event and develops according to various phases. This kind of disaster represented as a non-disaster or as a disaster only from the victim's point of view. And finally," the means used by the regime to deal with the disaster or to cope with its aftermath do not offer a sweeping solution to end the disaster, but instead focus on side issues and/or are aimed at individual case" (Azoulay,2012:31). To talk about the history of Regime-Made Disaster she says "the first half of the twentieth century saw several regime-made disaster par excellence that were not grounded in democracies, but the second half of the twentieth century has produced disasters that take place within and as a part of the structure of democratic governance itself" (2012:29). Although she is talking here about the century-long history of
Riot (2001), Shashi Tharoor’s third novel is set in the context of a fictitious riot that has resemblance to the riot that rocked Uttar Pradesh in 1989 as an aftermath of the Babri Masjid- Ram Janmabhoomi controversy. Tharoor unravels the history of communal India from the fictional context of the investigation of the death of a twenty-four year old idealistic American girl, Priscilla Hart, who was slain in India in the riot. From its premises, Tharoor also communicates his ideas “about ownership of history, cultural collision, religious fanaticism and the impossibility of knowing the truth” (