Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (21 page)

How surprised Chairman Anderson and his works manager Warren Woomer would have been if ever they had chanced upon those places
where so many men and children spent their lives making springs, truck parts, axles for weaving looms, bolts, gas tanks and
even turbine gears to the tenth of a micron; men and children, who with a surprising degree of dexterity, inventiveness and
resourcefulness, could produce, copy, repair or renovate any part or machine. Here the smallest scrap of metal, the lowliest
bit of debris was reused, transformed, adapted. Here nothing was ever thrown away. Everything was always re-born, as if by
some miracle.

In anticipation of the festival, labor had stopped in the workshops on the previous day, and everyone had scrambled to clean,
repaint and adorn the rooms with garlands of foliage and flowers. The workers of Orya, Chola and Jai Prakash also made the
god of tools proud.

In the space of one night, hellholes had been transformed into places of worship strewn with flowers and adorned with sumptuously
decorated temporary altars. The traditional chromo of the four-armed god perched on his elephant was everywhere. Yesterday’s
slaves had changed into gleaming shirts and brand new lunghis; their wives had got out their festival saris, preserved in
the family coffers from the greed of the cockroaches. The children were equally resplendent. The entire local population squeezed
in behind a brass and drum band whose flourishes resounded through the alleyways. The godfather Omar Pasha was present, with
a wife on either side of him, each dressed up like a queen in a silk sari that Ahmed Bassi had embroidered and encrusted with
pearls. The Muslim tailor was there as well, for the festivities transcended all religious differences. With his crony the
goateed mullah beside him, the sorcerer Nilamber, who was acting as pandit, led the procession from workshop to workshop,
saying mantras and blessing the tools with purifying fire. Behind him, Padmini walked proudly, in a long dress made out of
scarlet cotton, a gift from Sister Felicity. The young Indian girl had persuaded the nun to join in the celebrations. When
they spotted the cross around the sister’s neck, many of the workers asked her to come and bless their tools in the name of
her god. “Praise to you, oh God of the universe, who gives our daily bread, for your children in Orya Bustee, Chola and Jai
Prakash love and believe in you,” Sister Felicity repeated fervently in each workshop. “And rejoice with them at this day
of light in all the hardship of their lives.”

T
he City of the Begums could not help but bless the chairman of Carbide. No other industrial enterprise housed within Bhopal’s
ancient walls had been quite so concerned about its image; no other was quite so solicitous toward its staff. Each day brought
new examples of this extraordinary behavior. In the plant, Muslim workers had a place of prayer facing Mecca; Hindus had little
altars dedicated to their principal gods. During the Hindu festival in honor of the goddess Durga, the management gave the
workers a generator to light her richly decorated statue. The material advantages were no less plentiful. A special fund enabled
employees to borrow money for weddings and festivals. The insurance and pension plans put the factory ahead of most Indian
firms. A canteen, accessible to all, dispensed meals for a token price of two rupees.

In accordance with what they had been taught in Institute, however, it was the safety of their staff that was the prime concern
of the plant management. Carbide equipped Bhopal’s Hamidia Hospital with ultramodern resuscitation equipment, which could
treat several victims of gas poisoning simultaneously. The gift was greeted with public celebrations widely reported in the
press. In addition a hospital infirmary stocked with respiratory equipment, a radiology unit and a laboratory, was built at
the very entrance to the site. “We were convinced all these precautions were unnecessary,” Kamal Pareek said afterward, “but
they were part of the safety culture with which we had been inculcated.” Yet this same culture accommodated some surprising
deficiencies. The medical staff that Carbide hired did not have any specific training in the effects of gas-related accidents,
especially those caused by methyl isocyanate.

It fell to the young assistant manager for safety to share what he had learned at Institute with over a thousand men, most
of whom were almost oblivious to the dangers they faced every day. “Making people appreciate the danger was virtually impossible,”
Pareek would recount. “It’s in the nature of a chemical plant for the danger to be invisible. How can you instill fear into
people without showing them the danger?” Meetings to inform people, emergency exercises, poster campaigns, safety demonstrations
in which families took part, slogan competitions … Pareek and his superior were constantly devising new ways of awakening
everyone’s survival instinct. Soon, Warren Woomer was able to send a victory report to his headquarters in America: “We are
pleased to announce that half a million hours have been worked without losing a single day.”

Safety, Pareek knew, also depended upon a certain number of specific devices, such as the alarm system with which the plant
was equipped. At the slightest intimation of fire or the smallest emission of toxic gas, the duty supervisor in the control
room had orders to set off a general alarm siren. At the same time loudspeakers would inform personnel, first in English,
then in Hindi, of the precise nature of the gas, the exact location of the leak and the direction in which the wind was blowing.
This last piece of information was supplied by a wind sock at the top of a mast outside the MIC unit. In case of a major leak,
staff would receive an order to evacuate the site without panic, according to the practice drills Pareek regularly organized.

All the same, this alarm system was only intended to warn the crews working on the factory site. Though nearby residents could
hear the alarm, none of the loudspeakers pointed outward in the direction of the bustees where thousands of potential victims
were packed together. “From the moment I got there, the proximity of all those people was one of my major worries,” Warren
Woomer would admit. “Every evening I would have our guards move away those setting up camp right along our fence. Sometimes
some of them would even get over the wall, and we would have all the difficulty in the world getting them out. The plant had
such magnetic appeal! So many people wanted to get a job there! That’s what drew them nearer and nearer.”

One day Woomer decided to intervene personally with the municipal authorities to get them to force people to “move as far
away as possible” from his installations. His efforts failed. None of the authorities appeared disposed to launch another
eviction operation against the Kali Grounds squatters. Woomer proposed drawing up a plan to evacuate people in case of a major
incident. The very idea of such a plan drew immediate resistance from the highest level of the Madhya Pradesh government.
The people of Bhopal might panic, or worse yet, leave—a possibility that Arjun Singh, the state’s chief minister, found wholly
unacceptable. The elections were approaching and he needed every possible vote, no matter where it came from. The portly Omar
Pasha, his electoral agent in the three bustees, was already campaigning on his behalf. Astute politician that he was, he
had anticipated everything to ensure his reelection. Not only would he prevent the expulsion of his electors, but he would
win their votes by offering them the most spectacular present they could ever hope to receive.

The scene that engineer Kamal Pareek imagined one day was like a clip from a horror movie. The metal in one of the pipelines
had cracked, allowing a flood of methyl isocyanate to escape. Because the accident was not the kind of leak the safety equipment
could contain, the ensuing tragedy was unstoppable. A deadly cloud of MIC was going to spread through the factory, then into
the atmosphere. The idea for this disastrous scenario came to Pareek as he watched a train packed with passengers come to
a halt on the railway line that ran between the factory and the bustees. Would it be possible for a cloud of MIC driven by
the wind to hit those hundreds of poor wretches trapped in their railway cars? the engineer wanted to know. He went to Nagpur,
former capital of the Central Provinces, and presented himself at India’s national meteorological headquarters. Its archives
contained records of meteorological studies carried out in India’s principal cities for the last quarter of a century: temperatures,
hygrometric and barometric pressures, air density, wind intensity and direction and so on. All this information was recorded
on voluminous rolls of paper. After a week spent compiling data, the engineer was able to extract from this ocean a mass of
information about the meteorological conditions peculiar to Bhopal. For example, in 75 percent of the cases, the winds blew
from north to east at a speed of between six and twenty miles an hour. The average temperature in December was 15° C by day
but only 7° C at night.

Pareek packed this paperwork in a cardboard box and dispatched it swiftly to the safety department at Union Carbide in South
Charleston to have it simulated on the computer. Taking into account the meteorological conditions prevalent in Bhopal, the
technicians into the U.S. would be able to tell whether or not the toxic cloud of his scenario was likely to hit the train
that had stopped next to the bustees. The reply came back three days later in the guise of a short telex. “It is not possible,
even under the worst conditions, that the toxic cloud will hit the railway line. It will pass over it.”

“It will pass over it …” the engineer repeated several times, catching his breath. A vision of horror passed before his eyes.
“My God,” he thought, “so the cloud would hit the bustees.”

The vigorous games of tennis Warren Woomer played every morning before going to his office reflected his ebullient morale.
The Bhopal plant’s top man had every reason to be satisfied. After a mediocre first year, the production and sales of Sevin
had taken off. In 1981, they reached 2,704 tons: half the factory’s capacity but 30 percent more than Eduardo Muñoz’s most
optimistic predictions. Despite this success, however, the beautiful plant had some problems. The most serious arose from
the alpha-naphthol production unit. The installation designed by Indian engineers had never, despite several modifications,
been able to supply a product that was pure enough. They had therefore to resign themselves to importing alpha naphthol directly
from Institute in the United States. In the end this fiasco would cost Carbide $8 million, 40 percent of the original budget
for the entire construction.

There had been an earlier misfortune. In 1978 a fire had devastated part of the unit. The gigantic column of black smoke that
hid the sun before raining down foul-smelling particles on roofs and terraces had been Carbide’s first gloomy signature in
the sky over Bhopal. Seeing this incredible spectacle from his house, a young journalist by the name of Rajkumar Keswani rushed
to the scene of the disaster, only to find that the area had already been cordoned off by hundreds of policemen. No one was
allowed near.