Posted July 17th, 2004 at 12:11AMOn December 3rd, 1984, a factory in Bhopal, India leaked methyl isocyanate over the surrounding city in the worst industrial disaster in history. Although the exact death toll will never be known – corpses were disposed of in emergency mass burials and cremations – the Indian government currently puts the death toll at 22,000, and climbing. Today, the disaster is still affecting residents – increased cancer rates, birth defects & retardation, sterilization, et al., through the still-poisoned groundwater.
Was this an accident? Or criminal negligence? Documents released in 2002 suggest the latter. A 1973 document, signed by then-CEO Warren Anderson, noted that the technology at the plant was “unproven”. A safety review in 1982 warned of “serious potential for sizable releases of toxic materials” at the factory.
Neither Union Carbide – the corporation which owned the industrial plant – nor Warren Anderson have been brought to justice yet. In 1989, the Indian government settled with Union Carbide, for $470 million, on now-discredited estimates of 3,000 dead and 100,000 ‘affected’. The government never consulted a single victim of the disaster before settling.
After reviewing the settlement in 1991, an Indian court reinstated the criminal charges against Anderson and Union Carbide. When neither showed up to the trial, they were declared fugitives from justice.
Dow Chemical bought all of Union Carbide’s stock in 1999, and refuses to accept the previous company’s liabilities.
The US refuses to extradite Warren Anderson.
Why is such a gross injustice allowed to happen?
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Read this at The Progressive Voice
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can you either:
1) give me the URL to the old WMC so I can find my article
or
2) can you just e-mail it to me?
I don’t have it. I don’t know what happened – it vanished during an update because we had problems going from one version to the next.