Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [137]
The chairman of Union Carbide would never meet Rajiv Gandhi or any of his ministers. Only an official in the foreign office would agree to give him a brief audience, provided the press was not informed. The man who had hoped to change the living conditions of India’s peasants and who had wanted, as he had stated, to retire “in a blaze of glory,” left India broken, humiliated and despondent. He still did not know exactly what had happened on the night that spanned the second and third of December in India’s beautiful plant. As for his desire to provide the victims with aid, he had not even been able to discuss it. His journey had been a fiasco.
A few minutes before he climbed into his Gulfstream II and took off for the United States, a journalist called out to him, “Mr. Anderson, are you prepared to come back to India to answer any legal charges?”
Anderson turned pale. Then in a steady voice, he replied, “I will come back to India whenever the law requires it.”
In the meantime, other Americans had been landing in Bhopal. Danbury had rapidly dispatched a group of engineers whose mission it was to shed light on the catastrophe. Naturally the factory’s last American works manager was part of that delegation. For Warren Woomer, this return was a painful trial. “My wife Betty and I had spent two of the best years of our lives here. But now I’d come back to examine the remains of a factory, which had in a sense been my baby,” the engineer would later say. He had difficulty recognizing it. The ship he had left in good working order was now a spectacle of desolation that tore at his heartstrings. He made an effort to stay calm during his first encounter with Mukund. “Why was there so much MIC in the tanks? Why were all the safety systems deactivated?” Woomer fumed to himself. The inquiry team had agreed that they would avoid any confrontation. The important thing was to gather as much information as possible, not to create controversy.
The task threatened to be impossible, however, because officers from India’s Criminal Bureau of Investigation had taken over the inquiry. Their chief, V.N. Shukla, a stiff-necked unsmiling man, began by prohibiting the Americans access to the plant.
Then he told Woomer, “If I catch you, or any of your colleagues, interrogating any of the workmen, I’ll throw you in prison.”
Worse yet the CBI was also in the process of moving the factory’s archives to a secret location. What were the American investigators supposed to do, given that they could not examine the site, question witnesses or refer to such crucial documents as reports of procedures carried out on the fatal night? Woomer felt overwhelmed. Especially as the situation was further complicated by the arrival of a team of Indian investigators headed by a leading national scientist, Professor Vardarajan, president of the Indian Academy of Science. How could they cope with this competition and the police restrictions? Woomer soon passed from feeling overwhelmed to despair.
Once again, however, the good fairy of chemistry came to the rescue of its disciples. One thing upon which they were all in agreement was that before beginning their investigation, they needed to be certain that no further accidents could occur. It was this concern that haunted Woomer. There were still twenty tons of MIC in the second tank and one ton in the third. At any moment, those deadly substances could start to boil and escape in the atmosphere. On this, Americans and Indians were in accord. Should they repair the flare and burn the gases off at altitude? Should they get the scrubber back in order and decontaminate them with caustic soda? Should they try and decant them into drums and evacuate them to a safe place? In the end it was Woomer who came up with the solution.
“Listen!” he said, in his nonchalant but reassuring voice. “The best way to get rid of the remaining MIC is to use it to make Sevin.”
“But how?” asked the Indian professor, stupefied. “By getting the plant running,” replied Woomer. “After all, that was what it was built for.”
Making Sevin