Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [23]
“It was a really beautiful plant,” would recount American engineer Warren Woomer. He had joined Carbide at the age of twenty-two and had become an expert on high-risk plants. “It’s true that you had a sense of danger when you went in there. But I had gotten used to living among toxic substances. After all, chemical engineers spend their lives in contact with dangerous products. You have to learn to respect them and, above all, you have to get to know them and learn how to handle them. If you make a mistake, there’s very little chance they’ll forgive you.”
Warren Woomer knew that the piloting of this high-tech factory had been entrusted to the best professionals in the field. To belong to the MIC production unit was considered an honor on the Institute site. It also had its advantages as salaries there reflected the hazardous nature of the substances used: they were the highest in the company.
Carbide had provided the plant with an impressive arsenal of security systems. There were countless decontamination towers and flares capable of neutralizing and burning off large quantities of gas in case of accidental leakage. Hundreds of valves enabled any fluid showing an abnormal pressure to be evacuated into diversion circuits. Successions of thermostatic sluice gates, one-way valves, joints, rupture discs, temperature sensors and pressure gauges watched over all the sensitive equipment and the piping, which had itself been put together with high resistance welding and checked by X ray. Damping devices prevented any excessive movement of the metal. As in the most modern airplanes, the electric circuitry had been duplicated and protected to resist the onslaught of even the most corrosive acids. In the event of electricity failure, superpowerful generators would immediately cut in. Special double-skinned piping had been installed to conduct the MIC to its storage tanks. Between the skins a flux of nitrogen was circulated. Every ten yards sensors checked the purity of the gas. The tiniest escape of MIC into the nitrogen would be detected immediately and trigger an alarm and immediate intervention.
To ensure total reliability, the builders of Institute 2 had their high-performance equipment produced by International Nickel and Ingersol Rand, among the United States’ most eminent specialists in alloying and mechanical engineering.
No less exceptional precautions had been taken to ensure the safety of the staff. A network of loudspeakers and sirens, modulating differently according to the nature of the incident, was ready to go into action at the slightest alert. Crews of firemen specialized in chemical fires and a system of automatic sprinklers could flood the factory with carbonic foam in a matter of minutes. Dozens of red-painted boxes on every level equipped the workers with protective suits, breathing apparatus, ocular rinses and decontamination showers. The plant was even equipped with a monitoring system that was constantly analyzing samples taken from the atmosphere. If the safety level was exceeded, a loud alarm would sound and the location of the anomaly would appear on a screen.
With its walls studded with pressure gauges, levers and buttons, the control room looked like the flight deck on a Concorde. Day and night, different colored markers traced the plant’s every breath on rolls of graph paper. Keys, levers and handles relayed electronic orders to open or close the stop-cocks, shut down or activate a circuit, launch or interrupt a production or maintenance operation. One of the dials most carefully monitored was a temperature gauge. It was linked to thermometers located on each of the tanks of methyl isocyanate used in the continuous production of Sevin. Given that the needles on these instruments must never rise