Question

Bhopal, India

The incident investigation should deal with the chemical accident presented below. The case study should include the following components:

a brief introduction of the scene and the accident,

safety and health impacts of the accident,

a statement on the legal aspects of the incident,

an analysis of the key points from a project management perspective about the incident and accident, and

a summary of the article’s conclusions and your own opinions.

The Business Source Complete database within the CSU Online Library is the best source of journals for safety related articles.

The Bhopal Incident:

On 2 December1984, a pesticide factory owned by an American multinational, the Union Carbide Corporation, leaked a large amount of poisonous gas into the air surrounding a small and impoverished town called Bhopal, India. The immediate death toll has been estimated to be around 7,000 people, and the death toll from long-term health problems now stands at 25,000—and a further 25,000 people in the slums around the factory continue to be poisoned by the chemicals that have been left behind.

Conduct a case study on this disaster identifying safety management, safety audits, accident investigation, and industrial hygiene issues.

Requirements:

The project is required to be a minimum of 500 words in length (or a minimum of two pages double-spaced). You should follow APA style and referencing guidelines and choose articles from journals available on the CSU Online Library database. You may also use any website as a resource.

The incident investigation should deal with the chemical accident presented below. The case study should include the following components:

a brief introduction of the scene and the accident,

safety and health impacts of the accident,

a statement on the legal aspects of the incident,

an analysis of the key points from a project management perspective about the incident and accident, and

a summary of the article’s conclusions and your own opinions.

The Bhopal Incident:

On 2 December1984, a pesticide factory owned by an American multinational, the Union Carbide Corporation, leaked a large amount of poisonous gas into the air surrounding a small and impoverished town called Bhopal, India. The immediate death toll has been estimated to be around 7,000 people, and the death toll from long-term health problems now stands at 25,000—and a further 25,000 people in the slums around the factory continue to be poisoned by the chemicals that have been left behind.

Conduct a case study on this disaster identifying safety management, safety audits, accident investigation, and industrial hygiene issues.

Answer 1

Summary The explosion at the Bhopal Union Carbide factory in 1984 is still the world’s most lethal industrial disaster. It is well established that in its immediate aftermath many thousands of people died as a result of the inhalation of toxic fumes. A large proportion of these deaths were probably due to acute respiratory damage. The existence, nature and extent of chronic respiratory disease in the survivors is far less well established. The results of the case study described above strongly suggest that such disease exists independently of the background of disease in the city’s population. The findings are also compatible with the belief that much chronic disease, attributable to gas exposure, is characterized by airflow limitation, probably including small airways. Since this is likely to be relatively unamenable to direct treatment, the finding has important implications for the provision of appropriate health care to survivors in the city. The study also demonstrates the feasibility of epidemiological studies in this population, and reinforces the need and practicability of further work in this unfortunate population.

1. Introduction Although the immediate health effects of the Bhopal gas disaster are undisputed (the deaths of many thousands of citizens) the long term sequelae are poorly understood. This case study describes an epidemiological survey which aimed to establish the existence (or otherwise), nature and extent of chronic respiratory disease attributable to gas exposure in 1984. In addition, the relevant literature in this, and related, areas has been examined and is summarized. 2. Background 2.1. Union Carbide in Bhopal Bhopal, the state capital of Madya Pradesh, is geographically at the centerof India. About a third of its one million inhabitants live in tightly packed, shanty ('kucha') housing in its northern and central districts (see Figure 1). In 1969, Union Carbide (India), a subsidiary of the large American corporation, set up a pesticide formulation plant (Figure 2) on the north edge of the city, originally to import, mix and package pesticides manufactured in the United States. Ten years later, a 5000 ton methyl isocyanate (MIC) production unit was installed, primarily to manufacture an effective and inexpensive carbaryl pesticide marketed as 'Sevin'.

MIC is produced by the reaction of (mono)methylamine with phosgene, both of which were manufactured elsewhere in India and transported in bulk to Bhopal. There it was mixed with 1-naphthol to produce Sevin for sale throughout the country. MIC is colorless, with a low boiling point (39 oC) and high vapor pressure; because of its chemical instability it is stored under refrigeration in dry, stainless steel vessels. At the Bhopal plant, there were several such storage tanks, one (#610) having an unusually large capacity of 60 tons.

The Gas Disaster For reasons that remain unclear, the cooling system of tank 610 was not functioning in the last months of 1984. Late in the evening of December 2nd, it is hypothesized that water (either through mechanical malfunction or operator error) entered the tank, mixing with the stored MIC. The result was a violent, exothermic reaction, possibly catalyzed by ferrous corrosion of the tanks lining. By 01.00 a.m. the next morning, the tank ruptured and over the next few hours approximately 27 tons of vapor was discharged. Although most of this was probably pure MIC, products of hydrolysis (monomethylamine, carbon dioxide and various ureas) and pyrolysis (carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides and hydrogen cyanide) may also have been released in smaller quantities; the exact constitution of the discharged gases remains a matter for conjecture. There is very little available information on meteorological conditions that night, but data from the city’s airport suggest an air temperature of about 10 o C and a slow, northerly wind. At this temperature, the discharged MIC would have rapidly condensed and fallen groundwards, the plume passing over the northern edge of the city and towards its centre. An estimated 350 000 people were exposed. Immediate effects, and those over the following month, included the deaths of approximately 5000 people, most attributable to the direct respiratory effects of inhalation. Over the next three years, health studies of survivors confirmed residual, obstructive airways disease, though its nature was poorly characterized. Ophthalmic sequelae, prominent in the weeks after the disaster, were believed to be more transient; the presence of disease in other organ systems was not convincingly established. Since 1986, only small case studies of persistent (respiratory) disease have been published and the question of causation has been poorly addressed. No further epidemiological studies have been completed.