Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [101]
With the level of deterioration the plant had reached, someone should have been anticipating the worst. Moreover, there were indications that strange things were going on in tank 610 as well as in the apparatus next to it. Twice in succession, on November 30 and December 1, operators had tried to transfer some of the forty-two tons of MIC to the unit that was still manufacturing Sevin on a batch basis. In an operation of this kind, the contents of the tank had first to be pressurized by introducing nitrogen, a routine process in a properly maintained factory. But the beautiful plant was no longer in very good shape. Because of a defective valve, the nitrogen escaped as fast as it was put in. The valve was not replaced, and the forty-two tons of MIC were left in a tank that had not been properly pressurized. This meant that potential contaminants could get into the tank without meeting any resistance, and thus trigger an uncontrollable chemical reaction.
Rehman Khan was a twenty-nine-year-old Muslim who seldom parted from his embroidered skullcap, even when wearing his safety helmet. Originally from Bombay, he had moved to Bhopal to get married. His wife worked as a seamstress in the workshop that made Carbide’s coveralls. It was thanks to her that, after a brief training period, he had joined the MIC production unit as an operator. He had been working there for four months and earned a monthly salary of 1,400 rupees, a comfortable amount, given his lack of experience and qualifications. Like most of the 120 workers also on the site that evening, he had practically nothing to do. The factory’s production of MIC had been stopped. Khan was part of the second shift, and was on duty until twenty-three hundred hours. A passionate lover of poetry, as soon as his shift was over he intended to go to Spices Square for the grand mushaira being held in honor of the festival of Ishtema. To kill time that dreary winter’s evening, he had been playing cards with some of his comrades in the canteen when an urgent telephone call summoned him to the duty supervisor, Gauri Shankar, a tall bald Bengali who seemed extremely irritated.
“That lazy maintenance team hasn’t even managed to flush out the pipes!” he grumbled.
Shankar was referring to the pipework that carried the liquid MIC produced by the plant’s reactors to the tanks. Highly corrosive in nature, methyl isocyanate attacks pipes, leaving scoria deposits on their lining. High pressure jets of water had constantly to be sent into the piping to get rid of these impurities, not just because they would eventually block the flow, but above all because they could get into the storage tanks and contaminate the MIC.
Shankar brandished the logbook for the MIC production unit. “Here are the instructions left by A.V. Venugopal,” he explained. “The production supervisor wants us to flush the pipes.”
Khan knitted his thick eyebrows. “Is it absolutely necessary to do it this evening? The plant’s stopped. I would have thought it could wait till tomorrow. Don’t you think?”
Shankar shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea. In truth neither he nor Venugopal the supervisor were knowledgeable about the factory’s very complex maintenance procedures. They had both only just arrived there, one from Calcutta, the other from Madras. They knew virtually nothing about MIC or phosgene apart from their very distinctive smells. Like the former superdirector Chakravarty, the only industry they were familiar with was the one that produced Carbide’s fortune in India: batteries.
In his note, the supervisor had given succinct instructions as to how the requisite washing operation should be carried out. He stipulated that it should begin with the cleaning of the four filters and the circuit valves. He went on to supply a list of stopcocks to be turned off to prevent the rinse water from entering the tanks containing the MIC. But he had forgotten to recommend