• Item #A476
  • ISBN: 0936876476
  • ISBN13: 978-0-936876-47-4
  • Copyright 1986
  • Price: $10.00


The Bhopal Tragedy

What really happened and what it means for American workers and communities at risk

By M. Arun Subramaniam and Ward Morehouse

Blurbs

Content Sample

What Can We Do To Prevent Future Bhopals?

There is much that citizens, including workers, can do to help prevent future Bhopals, even though, sooner or later, somewhere another Bhopal will occur, for all of the reasons that Charles Perrow (author of "Normal Accidents") of Yale University has analyzed. But in addition to huge catastrophes like the Bhopal disaster, we must also be concerned about the little Bhopals--the numerous small accidents that occur all the time in hazardous industries--and slow Bhopals--the kinds of exposure to hazardous substances that take their toll not in a flash but in a lifetime, like asbestos.

The magnitude of this mixture of risk exposure--slow Bhopals, little Bhopals and big Bhopals--is very large. It has been estimated that over 100,000 workers every single year die in the United States of American because of some exposure to toxic chemicals--simply because they hit a time clock. And that does not include workers who are injured or die from industrially polluted water, from chemical dumping, and from emissions in the work place.

Even if we consider only workers and not people in surrounding communities, there is, as Mike Wright, Health and Safety Director of the United Steelworkers put it at the Newark Conference on Bhopal, a Bhopal every eight to 18 days depending on how many people you think died in Bhopal. So there are many Bhopals in just one year only in the U.S. If we had worldwide figures, they would certainly be several orders of magnitude greater.

It is crucial to look at different combinations of and variations on Bhopal because, as Charles Levinson, General Secretary Emeritus of the International Chemical and Energy Workers Federation from Geneva, Switzerland, pointed out at the Newark Conference, Bhopal will never repeat itself in exactly the same configuration. It will repeat itself--inevitably in his view--in a catastrophe of comparable magnitude, but it is very unlikely to recur again in the same detail and pattern. This means that we must take a number of different steps and develop a variety of responses to prevent future industrial disasters.

The significance of this situation was underscored by Dr. Irving Selikoff, Director of the Mount Sinai School of Environmental Medicine and one of the pioneers in the struggle to bring justice to the victims of hazardous industries. He told the Newark Conference that, within the last 40 or 50 years, the nature of our environment has changed in a fundamental way. We now live in a chemical world. At the end of l984, the American Chemical Society had 6.9 million substances in its registry file--with about 50,000 in common use. Over 560,000 new substances were added to the registry in that year. Of these, perhaps 500-600 were added to the repertoire of chemicals produced commercially.

The task this poses for protecting the well-being of workers and communities is, Selikoff emphasized, enormous. In l984, the American Chemical Society reported that it was registering new chemicals at the rate of 65 per hour! But it often takes years before the hazardous character of a particular chemical is discovered. Selikoff mentioned vinyl chloride as a good example. It was first produced in the U.S. in 1938 but it was not until 1974 that we learned just how destructive it could be.

If the costs and benefits of living in this chemical world were more equitably distributed, the problem of how to deal with future Bhopals would not be quite so serious. But the reality is different, whether it be the United States or India. For the overall pattern, as both Raphael Moure of the United Auto Workers and Mahesh Buch, the former government official and now environmental activist from Bhopal both pointed out in Newark, is that economic benefits--and particularly profits from industry--are privatized, while the social costs and overheads, ranging from damage to the environment and human health to infrastructure like roads and schools, are not. Everyone ends up paying for those. It is indeed quite possible that many chemical products, if all of these social costs and overheads were directly charged to them, would be so expensive that no one would buy them or that a company would not be able to make any profit.

The stakes in trying to prevent more Bhopals are, therefore, very large.