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U.S. reporters repeatedly hammered three themes in the press.
The first was that the Indian anger over the accident was an overemotional response by an ill-informed peasant population that simply could not accept that industrial accidents, though regrettable, are the inevitable price of progress. Times reporter William Broad put it most succinctly, noting that many of the Bhopal victims would not even have been alive to be killed had it not been for corporate citizens like UCC:
So too, experts argue, the tragedy in India has to be seen in its wider context.
"Of those people killed, half would not have been alive today if it weren't for that plant and the modern health standards made possible by wide use of pesticides,'' said Dr. Melvin Kranzberg...
The second theme was that the accident only happened because the Indians were incompetent. Here's how the house editorial at the Times put it on Dec. 9:
Part of the explanation may be a difference in culture. India's scientists are as good as any, but not all Indian workers have the same familiarity with machinery as Americans.
It should be noted that UCC later commissioned a study by the firm Arthur Little that concluded the accident had been caused by a deliberate act of sabotage by an Indian worker. Though the company did not name the worker, and never offered any evidence proving that a dog actually ate its homework, this was the position the company would ultimately take and stick to. The Indian government's response to the same study ("We are not impressed") got less ink.
The third theme in the press that week? That the real villains of the story were the American lawyers who were flying to India to organize class-action suits against UCC. Papers like the Post and the Times suddenly became victim advocates once the prospect of Melvin Belli taking 30 percent of a future settlement became a real possibility. Post columnist Richard Cohen took the extraordinary position that the lawyers were the real neo-colonialists in this tale:
This is ambulance chasing on a global scale, a new type of colonialism. If only the British had settled for a third of the profits, the sun might never have set on their empire.
Bhopal quickly faded from American newspapers. It has not faded so successfully in the actual city of Bhopal. Without being a melodramatic environmentalist—we know how that turns off American readers—it should be noted that 20 years after the disaster, there has still been no real cleanup of the Bhopal site, and in particular no cleanup of the city's water supply. Neither UCC nor its new parent company Dow has coughed up a dime for water-supply cleanup. The Indian government in 1997 did spend money on a few cans of red paint to mark 250 wells that were contaminated, but since most of the area's residents have no place else to get water, the wells are still used. Neither UCC nor Dow has ever formally accepted responsibility for the accident. Little of a very small $470 million settlement—arranged between the court and UCC, without consulting the victims—has actually been paid out.
What was so disgusting about the Bhopal story, and what continues to be disgusting, was not just that it happened, but that the story played out the way it did here in the States.
At least 7000 people died in the first week at Bhopal. Tens of thousands more subsequent deaths were directly attributed to the accident. More than 100,000 were injured. In the States this phrase—"100,000 injured"—was usually confined to just that phrase. Readers were seldom told that this meant thousands of people left with such serious respiratory problems that they cannot leave their homes or work (or, significantly, walk to an uncontaminated well). They were not told that Bhopal residents who were little girls in 1984 went on to live long, painful lives of blurred vision, chest pains and constant vaginal discharges. Little boys, for some reason, had a different reaction than the girls; they frequently failed to grow and remained miniature people their whole lives.
Fully grown men under five feet tall are not uncommon in Bhopal.
That the safety procedures were different in Bhopal than they were in the West Virginia plant was often noted in American news articles, but usually noted offhand. The extent to which this was true has rarely ever been mentioned in this country—not even last week, after Amnesty International released a report detailing the differences between the two UCC plants.
There is not enough space to be comprehensive, but here are a few bullet points:
• The Bhopal plant had no emergency "scrubbers" to render harmless any leaking gases. The U.S. plant did.
• There was no computerized monitoring of instruments in Bhopal. There was in West Virginia.
• The U.S. plant used inert chloroform for its cooling system; in Bhopal, they used brine, more dangerous and reactive with the liquid MIC.
• West Virginia had a refrigeration unit that was always on. Bhopal, in a cost-cutting move, had turned off its refrigeration unit the previous June. (They turned off refrigeration units in India!)
• UCC didn't even have an emergency plan with the city of Bhopal, had no system for informing the public, no emergency liaison. All of these things, in West Virginia, it had.
And so on; this list could go on for another page.
UCC ignored dozens of warnings—not general warnings about general safety lapses, but specific warnings about the specific problem that would ultimately occur. Two years before, a team of its own American technicians classified 10 major potential hazards at the plant, including what ultimately happened: a leak of MIC from its storage tanks.
But UCC did nothing, because UCC didn't give a fuck. It didn't have to. Even the worst-case scenario wasn't so bad. It's not like you'll have to replace the city's water supply if the plant explodes. It isn't Connecticut, for Christ's sake. Might as well go cheap, and hope everything works out. And if not...
