I will walk this ground forever
Today is the twenty year anniversary of the Bhopal disaster.
A summary of the Union Carbide Bhopal disaster, the worst industrial accident in human history
I had a long entry written up with my feelings about it, but livejournal just ate the whole thing. I'll try to reproduce a bit of my feelings here, though, because it's something I feel very strongly about, both as a chemical engineer and as a fellow human.
The first time I heard about Bhopal was in my Process Controls class, my junior year at Carnegie Mellon. Dr. Powers had been a member of the team responsible for determining the root causes behind the accident, and had spent a considerable amount of time after the accident thinking over the role of an engineer as it pertains to the value of human life. Until his class, I had never really put the two together; an engineer served a function in a company, whether it be builder, improver, or troubleshooter. It didn't occur to my naive mind how the decisions made by an engineer could impact the lives of thousands of people.
Have you ever been asked the question "What's the value of a human life?" It's a popular question in philosophy classes and is usually interpreted in an existential manner. In engineering and business terms, it's a very literal question - every safety process improvement is weighed against the cost in dollars of a potential lawsuit were the feature never implemented. One of our homework assignments in class involved calculating the actual price of a human life in a chemical manufacturing environment. I don't remember the number, but it was low. Engineers were worth a bit more because they're expensive and difficult to replace, but life is cheap for plant operators.
The horror of Bhopal is a lesson in the failure of process control as a result of poor off-site managerial decisions. The 27 tons of methyl isocyanate that poured out of the Union Carbide plant and sunk low over Bhopal like a deadly fog was not the result of a single mistake but rather the failure of six safety systems originally put into place when the plant was built in the '70s. If any one of those safety systems had worked, Bhopal would have been a footnote in one of my engineering textbooks rather than a disaster that continues to destroy the lives of the people living there two generations later.
Union Carbide (acquired by the Dow Corporation in 2001) refuses to accept responsibility for the disaster of Bhopal. Twenty years later, they still insist the accident was the result of disgruntled employees' sabotage rather than their own gross negligence, because if it's the result of sabotage, they don't have to pay any of the victims recompense for their suffering or lost family members. Even two generations after Bhopal, so-called "monstrous births" are still regularly occurring in the population - children born with only one eye, no neck, or fingers portruding from their shoulders, to name a few. Many of the survivors developed cancer, and women, both survivors and those born to survivors, developed terrible menstrual disorders. The abandoned hulk of the Union Carbide factory stands over the city of Bhopal, still poisoning the groundwater, as Union Carbide refuses to clean up the toxic mess they created. How many more generations will be poisoned as a result?
When I walked out of class that day, I swore that I would never work for Union Carbide. I cannot in good conscience work for a company that does not value human life. I have been careful when applying for jobs to research environmental practices as well; while they're typically stringent in the U.S., overseas is a different story, and I don't want to work for a company that's willing to cut costs by relocating manufacturing to another country just because they can blow whatever toxins they'd like into the atmosphere and dump their waste into the same river that's the locals' water supply. I don't want a job at the cost of my own conscience.
There's one particular ethics question pertaining the Bhopal that I've been wrestling with since the day Dr. Powers brought it up in class. One of the back-up safety systems was a flare tower that was supposed to burn the gas into less-harmful bi-product if it escaped. The flare tower was undergoing maintenance at the time of the accident and the the pipe that fueled the tower had been removed for repairs.
There was a back-up plan, though. In the case of an emergency, the shift manager was supposed to take a flare gun and fire directly into the cloud of methyl isocyanate. The resulting reaction would theoretically render the cloud harmless, but at the cost of the life of the person operating the flare gun. Dr. Powers didn't go into too much detail about it; he went on to say that the flare gun was never fired, another failed back-up system that could be blamed directly on human choice rather than negligence.
My initial reaction was anger. The fact that all of those lives could have been saved, that all of that suffering could have been averted if just one person had followed orders, overcame me and I was shaking by the time I got out of class. I couldn't believe that that person had failed the city of Bhopal at the time of its need.
That initial reaction held over me a long time. As I got to know my coworkers at the job that followed college, I began to see a different side. Instead of individual engineers and operators, I saw a woman who worked a job she hated so that she could feed her two children after her husband had been laid off. I saw a man who works an alternate late night/weekend schedule so that his wife can get a break from raising their infant twins and get out of the house. I saw a man who intentionally took the night shift in the plant so that he could spent time with his children while his wife worked. He and his wife rarely had a moment alone together. Engineers, operators, hell, even management - though it may not seem like it at times - are human, and there's a limit to what you can demand from any person.
I don't think any company has the right to ask you to sacrifice your life for your job. It took me a while to come to terms with that aspect of Bhopal, but what it really came down to was having to ask myself if I could have done the same thing in his position. I think I could have, but that doesn't mean it should have been expected. It would have been noble had he done it, but I can't blame the man for not sacrificing his life to fix a tragedy that was not his fault and never should have happened in the first place. The disaster at Bhopal on December 3rd, 1984, was the result of Union Carbide's negligence and poor cost-cutting decisions. It was not the fault of the man who would not fire the flare gun, nor the technician who removed the pipe from the flare tower, or any number of people who ran the plant's day-to-day functions. Bhopal was a mistake, and we can only overcome it by learning from it and preventing a similar disaster from ever happening again.
I still cry when I read the accounts of the survivors from Bhopal. I don't think it'll ever leave me. I was only seven when it happened, isolated in the happy bubble of childhood. As an engineer, I vow to do everything I can to prevent Bhopal from ever happening again. To me, the value is a human life is far beyond a simple dollar figure.
Money is replaceable. Life is not.
A summary of the Union Carbide Bhopal disaster, the worst industrial accident in human history
I had a long entry written up with my feelings about it, but livejournal just ate the whole thing. I'll try to reproduce a bit of my feelings here, though, because it's something I feel very strongly about, both as a chemical engineer and as a fellow human.
The first time I heard about Bhopal was in my Process Controls class, my junior year at Carnegie Mellon. Dr. Powers had been a member of the team responsible for determining the root causes behind the accident, and had spent a considerable amount of time after the accident thinking over the role of an engineer as it pertains to the value of human life. Until his class, I had never really put the two together; an engineer served a function in a company, whether it be builder, improver, or troubleshooter. It didn't occur to my naive mind how the decisions made by an engineer could impact the lives of thousands of people.
Have you ever been asked the question "What's the value of a human life?" It's a popular question in philosophy classes and is usually interpreted in an existential manner. In engineering and business terms, it's a very literal question - every safety process improvement is weighed against the cost in dollars of a potential lawsuit were the feature never implemented. One of our homework assignments in class involved calculating the actual price of a human life in a chemical manufacturing environment. I don't remember the number, but it was low. Engineers were worth a bit more because they're expensive and difficult to replace, but life is cheap for plant operators.
The horror of Bhopal is a lesson in the failure of process control as a result of poor off-site managerial decisions. The 27 tons of methyl isocyanate that poured out of the Union Carbide plant and sunk low over Bhopal like a deadly fog was not the result of a single mistake but rather the failure of six safety systems originally put into place when the plant was built in the '70s. If any one of those safety systems had worked, Bhopal would have been a footnote in one of my engineering textbooks rather than a disaster that continues to destroy the lives of the people living there two generations later.
Union Carbide (acquired by the Dow Corporation in 2001) refuses to accept responsibility for the disaster of Bhopal. Twenty years later, they still insist the accident was the result of disgruntled employees' sabotage rather than their own gross negligence, because if it's the result of sabotage, they don't have to pay any of the victims recompense for their suffering or lost family members. Even two generations after Bhopal, so-called "monstrous births" are still regularly occurring in the population - children born with only one eye, no neck, or fingers portruding from their shoulders, to name a few. Many of the survivors developed cancer, and women, both survivors and those born to survivors, developed terrible menstrual disorders. The abandoned hulk of the Union Carbide factory stands over the city of Bhopal, still poisoning the groundwater, as Union Carbide refuses to clean up the toxic mess they created. How many more generations will be poisoned as a result?
When I walked out of class that day, I swore that I would never work for Union Carbide. I cannot in good conscience work for a company that does not value human life. I have been careful when applying for jobs to research environmental practices as well; while they're typically stringent in the U.S., overseas is a different story, and I don't want to work for a company that's willing to cut costs by relocating manufacturing to another country just because they can blow whatever toxins they'd like into the atmosphere and dump their waste into the same river that's the locals' water supply. I don't want a job at the cost of my own conscience.
There's one particular ethics question pertaining the Bhopal that I've been wrestling with since the day Dr. Powers brought it up in class. One of the back-up safety systems was a flare tower that was supposed to burn the gas into less-harmful bi-product if it escaped. The flare tower was undergoing maintenance at the time of the accident and the the pipe that fueled the tower had been removed for repairs.
There was a back-up plan, though. In the case of an emergency, the shift manager was supposed to take a flare gun and fire directly into the cloud of methyl isocyanate. The resulting reaction would theoretically render the cloud harmless, but at the cost of the life of the person operating the flare gun. Dr. Powers didn't go into too much detail about it; he went on to say that the flare gun was never fired, another failed back-up system that could be blamed directly on human choice rather than negligence.
My initial reaction was anger. The fact that all of those lives could have been saved, that all of that suffering could have been averted if just one person had followed orders, overcame me and I was shaking by the time I got out of class. I couldn't believe that that person had failed the city of Bhopal at the time of its need.
That initial reaction held over me a long time. As I got to know my coworkers at the job that followed college, I began to see a different side. Instead of individual engineers and operators, I saw a woman who worked a job she hated so that she could feed her two children after her husband had been laid off. I saw a man who works an alternate late night/weekend schedule so that his wife can get a break from raising their infant twins and get out of the house. I saw a man who intentionally took the night shift in the plant so that he could spent time with his children while his wife worked. He and his wife rarely had a moment alone together. Engineers, operators, hell, even management - though it may not seem like it at times - are human, and there's a limit to what you can demand from any person.
I don't think any company has the right to ask you to sacrifice your life for your job. It took me a while to come to terms with that aspect of Bhopal, but what it really came down to was having to ask myself if I could have done the same thing in his position. I think I could have, but that doesn't mean it should have been expected. It would have been noble had he done it, but I can't blame the man for not sacrificing his life to fix a tragedy that was not his fault and never should have happened in the first place. The disaster at Bhopal on December 3rd, 1984, was the result of Union Carbide's negligence and poor cost-cutting decisions. It was not the fault of the man who would not fire the flare gun, nor the technician who removed the pipe from the flare tower, or any number of people who ran the plant's day-to-day functions. Bhopal was a mistake, and we can only overcome it by learning from it and preventing a similar disaster from ever happening again.
I still cry when I read the accounts of the survivors from Bhopal. I don't think it'll ever leave me. I was only seven when it happened, isolated in the happy bubble of childhood. As an engineer, I vow to do everything I can to prevent Bhopal from ever happening again. To me, the value is a human life is far beyond a simple dollar figure.
Money is replaceable. Life is not.