Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [144]
Anderson was so concerned by the crisis in morale of Carbiders the world over that he recorded a series of video messages intended to restore their confidence. These messages featured much discussion of ethics, morality, duty and compassion. The best way of getting things back on track, however, was still to show that the company was not guilty. On March 15, 1985, the vice president of the agricultural division of the Indian subsidiary, K.S. Kamdar, called a press conference in Bombay to announce that the tragedy had not been due to an accident but to sabotage. Kamdar based his statement on the inquiry carried out by the team of engineers sent to Bhopal the day after the disaster. According to this inquiry, a worker had deliberately introduced a large quantity of water into the piping connected to the tank full of MIC. This worker, who remained nameless, had supposedly acted out of vengeance after a disagreement with his superiors. To support this theory, the investigators had relied on the discovery of a hose close to tank 610 and, in particular, upon the doctoring of logbook entries made by the shift on duty that night. The report that supposedly incriminated a saboteur made no mention of the fact that none of the factory’s safety systems were activated at the time of the accident.
The authors of this book were able to identify and meet the man Union Carbide had accused. They talked to him at length. The man in question is Mohan Lal Varma, the young operator who, on the night of the disaster, identified the smell of MIC while his companions attributed it to an insecticide sprayed in the canteen. It is their deep-seated conviction that this father of three children, who was well aware of the dangers of methyl isocyanate, could not have perpetrated an act to which he himself and a large number of Carbide’s workers were likely to fall victim. His colleague T.R. Chouhan, wrote a book called Bhopal—The Inside Story, in which he points out large technical holes in Carbide’s sabotage story. Mohan Lal Varma’s innocence was, moreover, immediately recognized. No legal proceedings were ever instituted against him. Today he lives, quite openly, two hours outside Bhopal. If the survivors of the tragedy had had the slightest suspicion about him, would they not have sought vengeance? As it was, no one in Bhopal or elsewhere took the charge seriously.
Events would further conspire to refute it. Four months after the accident in Bhopal, on March 28, 1985, a methyl oxide leak at the Institute site in the United States poisoned eight workers. On the following August 11, another leak, this time from a tank holding aldicarb oxime, injured 135 victims in the Kanawha Valley. One of them was Pamela Nixon, the laboratory assistant at Saint Francis Hospital in South Charleston, who had noticed the smell of boiled cabbage years before. “I was among those who believed Union Carbide when they claimed that accidents like the one in Bhopal could not occur in America,” she told the press when she came out of the hospital. The incident had changed her life. She went back to college and joined the organization People Concerned About MIC, created by residents in her area. After which, armed with a degree